When the women traveled to the next county to buy beer,
it was for conditioning their hair. That was the belief,
though the well water could not have been sweeter
and every curl in that quarter was born lustrous.
If boys drove back roads, bottles open, and swerved
on bridges, if they did sink into rivers, silt bottoms softened
the fall. They were saved by the depth. Deep like the registers
new to their voices when they sang the old ballads.
And some girls who grew up hearing abstain and scrimp,
spurn and scrape by, learned to recall only what fondly wets
the eye. Summer parties in uncut fields. Lingering so long,
before I left, my skirt was drinking dawn dew.
PEACH JUICE
A woman may wake, a coupe from the cocktail
she enjoys each evening left on the counter,
and eat peaches over it, dripping.
While rivers go dry
and the Mississippi—that immensity, crossing
the length of the country—
brings to the ocean such toxicity
they meet in what’s known as the dead zone.
Algae blooms, consumes oxygen,
suffocates fish, kills even krill.
Blooms. Gardenia and jasmine scent share
the air she breathes in.
Juice runs off her chin, a small stream
that doesn’t flow prevailing currents’ way,
for which exception is made.
A tributary. If only she knew what tribute,
in return, to pay. And the gulf in her glass,
gathering—if its good could be
of the sweep, of the scale, of the sea.
A PARTICIPATION OF WATERS
It’s raining and I let myself sit and look
a long time. At water returning, or rather,
that never went away. Earth today
has the same amount of water as it did when Christ lived,
I read in a book. A beautiful idea,
so inclusive. And interrupted by news breaking:
* * *
Another black American’s killing.
This is happening today, so much the same,
a stagnant refrain. And the rivers remain
those that slave songs name. Trade routes
still trafficked, that can’t be crossed
to another world, or wash anyone clean.
* * *
A river doesn’t come from a single spring.
It’s side channels, seepage, and sewers, a system
of streams. It’s a participation of waters.
And in a storm, who can claim she’s just watching?
How the flow from my gutters goes, to join
the runoff in the public road—
BEFORE THE FIRST BELL
“In this election, arrogance and rancor win with rural white men.”
This is for Travis, Levi, Lyman, the end of the gentleness in him
learned from the soft, cupped shape of the coves of home.
Where for every second he spent firing a gun, he’d been silent
days’ worth of dawns watching deer, moving lightly as he could
over the earth’s surface crackling with fall leaves, among fragilities
to which he paid mind. Where, for any single notion about keeping
to his kind, there were so many minnows to count in the creeks,
bodies of unnamable color moving in an element other than his own.
But for him, the place became a pail whose confines he circles,
the oxygen all breathed up. Where prospects do not brighten
as the landscape is ever more fluorescent lit. He is crowded
into trailers, and with a certain type of men, whose muttered hatreds
headlines and elections declare loudly now. Now, I cannot extract him,
tell of the delicacy with which one boy once drew threads dripping nectar
from the throats of honeysuckle. The truth is, the flowers I remember
him with were plastic. He brought these as gifts to me, and a fledgling
from a nest on the playground at our elementary school. Where he returned
to the polls, where he cast his ballot. The eyes were sealed, yet see-through.
The featherless skin bare against the hands it passed into. The bird died before
the first bell. Maybe I should have been frightened from the very beginning.
Or this should be an elegy for my heart, the understandings, clemencies,
it will no longer hold.
WHO STAYS
She’s stung with resentment like nettle-slapped girl’s legs
So often, mud sucks at her feet saying, Squandered. But still
there are a few trout lilies, blossoms down-turned,
heads dropped, faces hidden. Those who don’t try to show,
and see something in this dirt. Wildflowers tend to themselves
while all people plant these days are satellite dishes.
Their necks crane in crazy directions to get any shot at the sky,
some signal from far off.
RETURN VISIT
It’s cut off, the hotel. From the town
to which there are no sidewalks. The grassy
bit between walled interstates each going
opposite, absolute directions away. The air
outside unopenable windows. The Appalachian
ridges in sight beyond, above the low, base lines
of box stores, but not in reach. The question
How did I ever leave mountains? displaced
by What’s left of here? in a chain business.
Called that, but link-less. Even fully booked,
a vacant building.
It was isolation of another kind, no roads across
rough terrain, growing up talking to oneself
in an uninfluenced accent, that once let a rural place
keep alive its ways. In the lobby, there’s a pamphlet
about the past, folk art. Images to make study of,
here where I’m stuck. A sculpture, an ark, crafted
from scrap wood, populated by pigs and possums.
Not lions and elephants. By locals, not exotics
the carver couldn’t, in his time, know. His focus
devoted, defined by hills, tightly framing how far
the eye will go.
Though today too, in a traveler—in rented rooms,
in walls where water sound can only be the brook
of next door’s flushing, in departure gates’ fluorescent light
where any foliage is faux—sincere feeling arises. An urge
to unseal the sterile, individual package of every lonely
soap and peanut. And the airport shuttle offers a view
of curing tobacco, a traditional crop, or a ruinous one.
But a color that is a glory, in any case. The gold it turns
because it has been cut. So long, the ark was adrift.
Consider the many beasts, the wild beliefs,
it carried forward.
PASTORAL
Cattle are a black weight on the light sway of land that was once
prairie. The wind pulls at pasture, wantful; they appear to hold it in place.
Though it was the cattle that ate away the native grasses.
Perhaps the impressi
on is scenic because their necks are bent
with the downward stroke of feeding. I could say the oil derricks
too are feeding, with enormous avian pecks.
Or that they are nodding in assent. Yes, yes, we are allowed
so much. Let us strike, again, the pose of plenty.
FINE DUST
Is there time to marry, or at least
to buy a house, plant a maple by the door,
and see it mature? That’s what the small
mind asks when someone speaks
about the big picture:
How soon the aquifer underlying
the heartland, water older than the Ice Ages,
will have been pumped dry to irrigate corn,
to feed hogs.
* * *
But what about the narrowness of vision
that kept settlers on their land all through
the Dust Bowl? Wasn’t it admirable,
how they could not see living elsewhere
and stayed through ten years of storms
while all fertile soil was stripped away?
Of course, there are the broader
human habits. How when we stopped
looking to the sky, the past’s reverent pose
of asking for rain, we kept on making
demands from prairie plowed to desert land.
Now irrigators draw water from below,
and we don’t drop our heads.
* * *
What the Dust Bowl did, mostly,
was make a sweeping statement,
wiping people out. The families who waited
through it were faceless and voiceless, hanging
wet towels over their heads to breathe
through the dust, and so they could not speak.
The earth blurred the fine lines of fences,
drifting feet of itself over post tops
so animals walked above them and away.
Still there is some comfort to be taken
from details: During storms,
people kept close, clustered in one room.
And static electricity sparked
on spikes of barbed wire, highlighting
the boundaries of property.
* * *
When every bit of sun
was obscured by the topsoil
of a million wasted acres rising up,
dirt-blinded people reached
for each other in the dark.
And our hands practice the same
spanning gesture across the space
of beds, after every ordinary evening’s
blackout falling.
REPEAL
An abandoned mansion,
from the time of Temperance,
what it must have held:
hair bobbed short,
cocktails poured tall,
not just drunkenness
but the double sin
of deception too.
Finally, the house is allowing
itself to fall,
letting down the white walls.
Better to rot outright,
return lot to field,
render lumber down to dirt—
that’s the closest to cleanliness,
to righteous, you’ll get.
So the sight seems to say.
Or I have come for that answer.
If there is one, to the question
of why be here, anywhere I stand,
anywhere I go.
WHAT SURVIVES
There is sweat at the back of our necks
seven months out of the year. That’s true,
that and an ugly history too. At least,
in the South, the Ice Age never quite came.
I can say that while glaciers scraped the North
clean, here there was only a little winter.
From the warm, deep dirt that remained,
plantations’ fruitage grew.
Then their produce, poverty. It’s still fresh.
But a great diversity survived,
of animal species, I mean. Our mud is home
to half the mussels on the continent.
Those fine beings filter tainted water.
While the country’s sole cave fish swims
unbiased nearby, with no color,
no eye.
MOTIONLESS
In the photos of Sherman’s March—no action.
Cameras could not yet capture
subjects in motion. No battles, just battlefields,
landscapes after. Trees, bark blasted off,
burned bridges and barriers overcome.
Broad strokes of blackened fields, sweeping
the eye from the small interjections of fallen fence
and fireplace, standing alone, to disappearing points,
detail broken down in the indiscriminate texture
of rubble and wreck.
For film to register faces, people had to keep still
so long they wore iron neck braces,
not to tremble and blur the picture. Bodies
gun-shot didn’t pose such a problem,
and must have piled themselves before the photographer.
But how hopeless the honesty of showing the dead,
when, in a composition, trees can function as a frame,
form a place where tensions are only between background
and fore. And the shattered buildings, the splintered beams—
they thrust up into the shape of branches, growing back.
(after the photographs of George N. Barnard, photographer for General Sherman)
ACCRUAL
After the Civil War, painting the American West
was popular because it was not the setting
of either side’s tragedy. People thought they wanted
to look at scenes free from the marks of our enemies
and selves. But what man has ever really lusted for
the untouched except in the briefest of moments before
he lays his own hands all over it? Surroundings
that exemplify purity are unsettled, empty.
Eastern architecture’s crowded, old walls hold on
to the curios of fondness, along with the clutter of anger.
And, really, isn’t the woman most wanted she who remembers
everything, who knows man’s faults, and will spoil him still?
Spoil—that’s the word used for what builders of houses do
to once-wild landscapes they admire too much to let alone.
PRESERVATION
Neon signs—why not care for them?
They’re historic now. Businesses fail but
the signs’ ideas endure far from the actual:
Cleaning nowhere near the wringing
of hands in the laundry. Repair
with no wrenches in reach.
These bent and soldered sales pitches,
serenades of gas stations and seedy hotels,
may lack the elegance of antique and artifact.
But there are those who tend to
the flickering of the familiar before it expires.
Who exalt the dullard every day, ignite
a No to go against the Vacancy,
and live in that kind of light.
THE JEWELS WITH WHICH TO MAKE DO, THE JEWELS THAT THERE WERE
The woman is wearing, with such style
and intention, only one earring—
she makes the half lost
exquisite. Praise her.
As we praise parks, what’s left of wilderness,
and the literature of the diaspora.
Give her the unmatched remainders
of our pairs—one stud, one star, one single hoop,
an actual diamond, antique,
much iridescence, incomplete.
Compliment her further by recalling
that the forest was finest in its first growth—
high canopies hung with the lobes
of a multiplicity of leaves,
chestnuts set in the prongs of pods,
and below, made of birch bark’s silver
and mud, a few homes
built where their inhabitants belonged.
Because it means you see what beauty is
here, and what she ought to have:
jewels in a complete set,
presented in a box that opens
to its landscape of velvet, opulent
threads not yet asked to rise back
from the crush of any touch.
(for Tarfia)
AMERICAN PERSIMMON
I have tried to carry a persimmon home,
to share one fruit. I passed the tree running,
a pursuit which allows no pockets, no bags.
Needs no equipment. No team.
I was many miles away,
and could not clench my fist.
I told myself to hold my hands like good men
every time they choose not
to use their strength.
But a good persimmon
is already halfway to ruin.
A ripe fruit falls,
wrinkled and dark.
Too fragile to bear reaching the ground,