NELL
Not until my father had led her into the paddock
And driven her a month in circles and made
Her walk six weeks with the collar on her neck
And the bags of seeds on her back did he snap
The leather traces to the hames, for she was not
Green halter-broke when he took her that way,
Rearing and shying at each birdcall of shadow.
It would be another year in blinders before she
Began seeing how it would go from then on,
Moving not as herself alone but as one of a pair,
With the sorrel gelding of the same general
Conformation and breed shuffling beside her,
And between them only the split tongue
Of the wagon. As is often the case with couples,
He the subdued, philosophical one, and she
With the great spirit and the preternatural knack
Of opening gates, they had barely become
A team when the beasts began vanishing from
The fields, and the fields, one by one, fell
Before the contagion of houses. Still, they
Were there for a long time after the first
Tractors and the testing of rockets, so you
Could see how it had been that way for years
With them, just the one motion again and again
Until at dusk when the harnesses were lifted,
The odor that rose seemed history itself,
And they bent to their feed in the light
That would be that way for the rest of their lives.
RISKS
I had not seen how dangerous the country was
Until he gunned it, downshifted into third,
And split the seam between the station wagon
Going east and the tractor-trailer going west,
The needle dead on the speedometer's horizon,
All of us tarred black from a day of laying pipe,
The cold Buds like tickets in our greasy fingers,
Him hollering fuckers and us begging stop
You son-of-a-bitch Jimmy stop this thing let me out—
We were going to college, we would be something,
And nothing like him, married, a dad at seventeen,
Though later, when we talked, it would be of him,
Stumbling home drunk at five a.m. to sucker-
Punch his father-in-law, then torch the garage,
As earlier, it had been of him, bolting from the cliff
Above the rock crusher, clowning through flips
For the first fifty feet, then knifing down clean,
The water so smooth, and him holding his breath
So long down there they said there was a cave
Under a big rock where he would come up,
Roll a leviathan joint, and smoke it as we stood
Arguing the details of calling the rescue squad,
And then he would surface with that same hard
Contagious laughter he had carried from childhood,
As he had always been the one holding it up to us,
The tattoos, the muscles, the slicked-back hair,
Sassing and taunting, even when he had gone
To Nam and the dozen shit jobs and the pen,
After the burglaries, the assaults, the homicide,
Him talking through our mouths, him clenching
Our fists, him never taking it from anyone.
And now—given the consecutive lives to think,
The nights in the cell, the days sewing wallets,
Pressing sheet metal into tags, loading laundry
Into chutes, hoeing the prison beans—does he
Think of us at all, is he even conscious of us
When he dreams he has us begging on our knees?
And when the blood starts, does he love us
Now that we speak of him often and always
With that sweet fear that marks our liberty?
FIRST FRAUDULENT MUSE
Not seventeen, she dumped me.
No one has to tell me
A thing about the sorrows,
Aches, indiscretions,
And calamities of young poets
Of the United States
In the late twentieth century.
The poem I wrote then,
Want me, either for my wry
Sensitivity or the scholarly erudition
Of my heart, is not this one.
It made some obscure reference
To the goddess Diana
While drizzling bad terza rima
About some poor decrepit wino
Eviscerating a garbage can.
My good friend looked at it
And made me know what
Kind of damn idiot I sure was.
His maxims come back—read
Everything, love language, revise,
Abide in the transforming fire—
And hers, mutated by distance.
While I was attaching the syllables
Of a certain mulberry tree
To an adjective that I loved,
She went and married an electrician.
Still I had to make a living,
Mindful of the preserving
Potential of the art,
And language clattering
Onto the platen like the small
Dark horse of the embalmer's salt.
Always it is the same night
I called her lily of the valley
And named her in many songs.
She keeps turning
Her cold beautiful shoulder
Into someone else's words.
IN THE SPIRIT OF LIMUEL HARDIN
This morning some bald and wiry spirit,
Wreathed in smoke and shedding dark peals
Of laughter, has come down from the stand
Of cedars to hold forth to my father and me
Baefore retreating back into that soldery mist
Lifting above the portable sawmill.
Born the same year as my father, he is just old
And dying of emphysema, there is not enough
Breath left in him now to move the wing
Of a butterfly an inch from the scattering
Of chips cast by the blade of the saw,
But he laughs anyway, the laughter like
A fire that you draw up to, cupping your hands
And waiting for some ancient raconteur to squat
On his haunches and grub in the mulch
For a root to whittle into a box turtle
Before going on about the patient business
Of constructing oral history, but this morning
It is my father hemming and hawing
In that deliberate style that has marked
All his words since his stuttering childhood.
In his tale, everyone is dead or dying:
The Wilcutt girl, shot by her estranged husband
After he returned, out of his mind on dope,
And held the family hostage, the sheriff
Talking to him all night, convincing him
To let out the baby and the grandparents,
But then the silence, the scream, the shots;
This is supposed not to make us laugh,
But I laugh, and then Limuel gets started,
A dry chuckle at first, like a shaft turning
In the crankcase of a rusting Farmall,
And you can see it hurts, but my father
Cannot stop. Now it is the Pruett boy—
He had just moved here, he was working
Behind his mama's house with a bulldozer
Leveling the thicket for a trailer pad—
That boy had always been afraid of hornets.
Right up under that big walnut tree
Where the old outhouse used to stand,
Suddenly the hornets on him like a blaze,
He jumped, and a woman working nearby
Said that the track rolled over his head,
No one could find it, though she got there
So fast, his hand still gripped a cigarette,
A long ash, and the smoke curling up.
Sad, my father says, and nods,
But all the time, Limuel and I, grimly,
Secretly holding it, and now it comes,
The full-blown, gut-wrenching laughter,
The first hack, another and another, until
It has him on his knees in the wood chips,
Raising the inhaler, rubbing away the tears,
So we go over to him and help him to his feet
And walk with him as far as the spring,
And he goes on up into the trees, laughing.
THE END OF COMMUNISM
Now I have Vallejo with me on the desk, his troubled words, and
behind the words, his life tapped out
In Paris in 1938 while my grandparents shouldered one of the last
springs of the Deep South Depression.
Vallejo, who felt compassion for the travails of oppressed laborers,
would not have imagined my grandparents,
Dirt farmers and slaves of nothing but survival, with no boss but
cramping hunger and penury,
The work of a few mild days wedged between the cold spells and
the rains.
They waged their revolution against clods, and when they'd dropped
their seeds, the main battles were still to come.
The war against the weeds yielded to the long August drought—
stillbirths everywhere, cholera in the wells.
Maybe my grandparents would have had no compassion for the
suffering of poets, who, even then,
Had time to dillydally over huge books and learn foreign languages
and skedaddle halfway round the world and live
In impoverished splendor while they bent their youth against the
cheating fields.
But when Bird Wilheit came starving and broke, they let him sleep
in a room behind the house,
For which privilege he was given the field beside them to work, a
place at their table
And the luxury of living fifty more years, a slave's son and maybe a
slave himself. My grandparents loved Bird Wilheit.
I do not know that they would have loved Vallejo for writing what
they already knew, that the world was a thief,
That many murderers sat far away in the feathery chairs of heated
parlors.
They knew that someone somewhere knew more than they knew,
and that such knowledge,
Imperfect and querulous as it must have been, was more than tall
cotton and no salvation.
They knew work started in the bitter dark and ended in the bitter
dark.
They knew prices were fixed against them, and to hell with it as long
as everything
They watered and pampered into life did not die of floods or
drought.
I have done a little work with my shoulders, back, legs, and arms. It
has been a long time
Since I have done anything besides thinking, talking, and writing.
What good is that
If it does not put a coat on someone's back? My grandfather, when he
went into the nursing home,
Refused the government money. He was not rich, but neither was he
broke. He worked.
Things came up. My grandmother moved beside him down the rows.
I do not know that anyone young will care what fomented the red
dirt so I might fiddle with instruments
And read great books and mumble bad Spanish in my ripe Alabama
drawl, but just because the shirt
On my back winds back to the drudgery of a field is no reason for
guilt. I let the dead go on ahead of me:
My grandfather saying, "I reckon if you split up everything in equal
parts, in five years the same folks would have it again";
And Vallejo reckoning "the enormous amount of money that it costs to
be poor."
A RIDE WITH THE COMMANDER
Suddenly, in the back of the boat, my Quinn of Mexico cap blown off
and shrinking
Behind me in the wake as we motor across the gulf, I look up to my
father-in-law
Hunched at the throttle the way he must have concentrated years ago
as he slanted from clouds
To dive-bomb a destroyer. I think, Just let it go, don't mention it, but then
He turns and, with his trained eye, gets a glimpse of it, bobbing back
there like a duck,
And then me, bareheaded: "Well goddam, why didn't you tell me you'd
lost it?"
By which I think he means not just the cap but how I've lived my life,
so undisciplined and regardless
Of money that why his daughter puts up with me he'll never know.
Maybe this is why
Now he jerks the boat so sharply that I'm slammed against the gunnel
before he gooses it with
Such precision that by the time he cuts the gas and idles alongside,
I'm sitting exactly where I was—
"Well, dip it out!" he says, and already as I snatch it, we're planing up
to the speed he loves,
The maze of mangrove canals behind us, the Pacific calm in the
distance, but choppy
In the bay's mouth, thundering as it masons its great white chimneys
above the shoals,
So just as we turn, I imagine the night sky lit with fire, and life risked
in terrible joy.
Another mile, we're gliding silently into the cove, and then, anchors
down, we're as we were:
Me sitting with the women, digging in the warm sand for clams, and
him frisking
The icebox for a beer before wading out to stand in deeper water with
men like himself,
Men with large voices, bankers raised in the Depression, merchants
who have known war.
You can see this from the way they congregate equidistant from each
other,
With their arms folded across their chests in equal poise—each has
a secret
He would not divulge under any conditions, no matter the torture.
ON PICKINESS
When the first mechanical picker had stripped the field,
It left such a copious white dross of disorderly wispiness
That my mother could not console herself to the waste
And insisted on having it picked over with human hands,
Though anyone could see there was not enough for ten sheets
And the hands had long since gone into the factories.
No matter how often my father pointed this out,
She worried it the way I've worried the extra words
In poems that I conceived with the approximate
Notion that each stanza should have the same number
Of lines and each line the same number of syllables—
And disregarded it, telling myself a ripple
Or botch on the surface, like the stutter of a speaker,
Is all I have to affirm the deep fluency below.
The Hebrews distrusted Greek poetry (which embodied
Harmony and symmetry, and, therefore, revision)
Not for aesthetic reasons, but because they believed
That to change the first words, which rose unsmelted
From the trance, amounted to sacrilege against God.
In countries where, because of the gross abundance
Of labor, it
's unlawful to import harvesting machines,
I see the women in the fields and think of how,
When my mother used to pick, you could tell
Her row by the bare stalks and the scant poundage
That tumbled from her sack so pristinely white
And devoid of burrs, it seemed to have already
Passed through the spiked mandibles of the gin.
Dr. Williams said of Eliot that his poems were so
Cautiously wrought that they seemed to come
To us already digested in all four stomachs of the cow.
What my father loved about my mother was not
Just the beauty of her body and face, but the practice
Of her ideas and the intelligence of her hands
As they made the house that abides in us still
As worry and bother, but also the perfect freedom beyond—
As cleanliness is next to godliness but is not God.
GROUND SENSE
Because I have known many women
Who are dead, I try to think of fields
As holy places. Whether we plow them
Or let them to weeds and sunlight,
Those are the best places for grief,
If only that they perform the peace
We come to, the feeling without fingers,