Still passed out cold, twitching in a dream.
When we stop talking, we hear the soft sounds
He makes in his sleep. Not quite barking. More like
Learning to speak. As if he’s in the middle of a scene
Where he must stand before the great dog god
Trying to account for his life.
FIELD GUIDE
You were you, but now and then you’d change.
Sometimes your face was some or another his,
And when I stood facing it, your body flinched.
You wanted to be alone—left alone. You waded
Into streets dense with people: women wearing
Book bags, or wooden beads. Girls holding smoke
A moment behind red mouths then pushing it out,
Posing, not breathing it in. You smiled
Like a man who knows how to crack a safe.
When it got to the point where you were only ever
Him, I had to get out from under it, sit up
And set my feet on the floor. Haven’t I lived this
Enough times over? It’s morning, but the light’s still dark.
There’s rain in the garden, and a dove repeating
Where? Are? You? It takes a while, but a voice
Finally answers back. A long phrase. Over
And over. Urgently. Not tiring even after the dove
Seems to be appeased.
EGGS NORWEGIAN
Give a man a stick, and he’ll hurl it at the sun
For his dog to race toward as it falls. He’ll relish
The snap in those jagged teeth, the rough breath
Sawing in and out through the craggy mouth, the clink
Of tags approaching as the dog canters back. He’ll stoop
To do it again and again, so your walk through grass
Lasts all morning, the dog tired now in the heat,
The stick now just a wet and gnarled nub that doesn’t sail
So much as drop. And when the dog plops to the grass
Like a misbegotten turd, and even you want nothing
More than a plate of eggs at some sidewalk café, the man—
Who, too, by now has dropped even the idea of fetch—
Will push you against a tree and ease his leg between
Your legs as his industrious tongue whispers
Convincingly into your mouth.
THE GOOD LIFE
When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.
WILLED IN AUTUMN
The room is red, like ourselves
On the inside. We enter
And my heart ticks out its tune
Of soon, soon. I kneel
On the bed and wait. The silence
Behind me is you, shallow breaths
That rustle nothing. This will last.
I grip the sheets, telling time
To get lost. I close my eyes
So the red is darker now, deep,
A willed distance that backs away
The faster we approach.
I dream a little plot of land and six
Kid goats. Every night it rains.
Every morning sun breaks through
And the earth is firm again under our feet.
I am writing this so it will stay true.
Go for a while into your life,
But meet me come dusk
At a bar where music sweeps out
From a jukebox choked with ragged bills.
We’ll wander back barefoot at night,
Carrying our shoes to save them
From the rain. We’ll laugh
To remember all the things
That slaughtered us a lifetime ago,
And at the silly goats, greedy for anything
Soft enough to crack between their teeth.
SONG
I think of your hands all those years ago
Learning to maneuver a pencil, or struggling
To fasten a coat. The hands you’d sit on in class,
The nails you chewed absently. The clumsy authority
With which they’d sail to the air when they knew
You knew the answer. I think of them lying empty
At night, of the fingers wrangling something
From your nose, or buried in the cave of your ear.
All the things they did cautiously, pointedly,
Obedient to the suddenest whim. Their shames.
How they failed. What they won’t forget year after year.
I am trying to decide what they feel when they wake up
And discover my body is near. Before touch.
Pushing off the ledge of the easy quiet dancing between us.
ALTERNATE TAKE
for Levon Helm
I’ve been beating my head all day long on the same six lines,
Snapped off and whittled to nothing like the nub of a pencil
Chewed up and smoothed over, yellow paint flecking my teeth.
And this whole time a hot wind’s been swatting at my door,
Spat from his mouth and landing smack against my ear.
All day pounding the devil out of six lines and coming up dry,
While he drives donuts through my mind’s back woods with that
Dirt-road voice of his, kicking up gravel like a runaway Buick.
He asks Should I come in with that back beat, and whatever those
Six lines were bothered by skitters off like water in hot grease.
Come in, Levon, with your lips stretched tight and that pig-eyed grin,
Bass mallet socking it to the drum. Lay it down like you know
You know how, shoulders hiked nice and high, chin tipped back,
So the song has to climb its way out like a man from a mine.
SACRAMENT
The women all sing when the pain is too much.
But first there is a deep despairing silence.
I don’t know what rocks in them, what wants
To knock them clear. Not just the child,
Who knows only to obey. This something
Takes them from chatter, to a silly dance,
Down to all fours begging to die. Then
It drags them up by the hair, or lays them out flat
And strikes them on the head. Then they see it,
So bright it should be death, commanding now.
And again, after a pause. Now. Nothing else
Is there between it and them. It burns the air,
Singes sound. Their voices sink deep into themselves,
Down through flesh into the body’s own hell. Sometimes
It takes forever for that song only the animals know
To climb back up into air as if to burst the throat.
WHEN YOUR SMALL FORM TUMBLED INTO ME
I lay sprawled like a big-game rug across the bed:
Belly down, legs wishbone-wide. It was winter.
Workaday. Your father swung his feet to the floor.
The kids upstairs dragged something back and forth
On shrieking wheels. I was empty, blown-through
By whatever swells, swirling, and then breaks
Night after night upon that room. You must have watched
For what felt like forever, wanting to be
What we passed back and forth between us like fire.
Wanting weight, desiring desire, dying
To descend into flesh, fault, the brief ecstasy of being.
From
what dream of world did you wriggle free?
What soared—and what grieved—when you aimed your will
At the yes of my body alive like that on the sheets?
US & CO.
We are here for what amounts to a few hours,
a day at most.
We feel around making sense of the terrain,
our own new limbs,
Bumping up against a herd of bodies
until one becomes home.
Moments sweep past. The grass bends
then learns again to stand.
NOTES
The title “My God, It’s Full of Stars” is adapted from a quote from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which reads “The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it’s full of stars!” It is also the opening line to Peter Hyams’s film, 2010.
The title “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” is a quote from David Bowie’s song “Sound and Vision,” which was released on the 1977 album Low.
“Savior Machine” draws its title from David Bowie’s “Saviour Machine,” which appears on the 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World.
“The Speed of Belief”: the Javan, Caspian, and Bali are species of tiger believed to have gone extinct.
The title “Life on Mars” is borrowed from David Bowie’s song “Life on Mars?” released in 1971 on the album Hunky Dory. Passages within section 7 of the poem, which refers to prisoner abuse by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are taken from the following sources:
“It was pretty disgusting, not what you’d expect from Americans” is a quote from Senator Norm Coleman (R) Minnesota, taken from “Weekly Review,” Harper’s Magazine, May 18, 2004.
The May 4, 2004 Rush Limbaugh Show, titled “It’s Not about Us; This Is War!”:
CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men—
LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
“They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected” is based on the following New York Times reports from the spring of 2009:
On May 6, 2009, Stephen P. Morgan shot and killed Wesleyan undergraduate Johanna Justin-Jinich. A journal belonging to Morgan contained entries reading “I think it okay to kill Jews, and go on a killing spree at this school,” and “Kill Johanna. She must die.”
On May 28, 2009, off-duty NYPD Officer Omar Edwards was fatally shot by fellow Officer Andrew P. Dunton. Edwards, who was black, drew his weapon after encountering and racing after a man who was breaking into his car on East 123rd Street. Officer Dunton, one of three white officers in an unmarked police car patrolling the neighborhood, saw him racing down the street with his pistol in the air, and emerged from the car to shout, “Police! Drop the gun.”
On May 30, 2009, Jason “Gunny” Bush, Shawna Forde, and Albert Gaxiola of the Minutemen American Defense group arrived at the home of Raul J. Flores dressed in uniforms resembling those of law-enforcement personnel. They opened fire, killing Flores and his nine-year-old daughter, Brisenia, and injuring his wife, Gina Gonzalez.
On May 31, 2009, late-term abortion practitioner Dr. George R. Tiller was shot and killed in the foyer of his church in Wichita, Kansas. Scott Roeder was taken into custody as a suspect in the shooting. Sixteen years earlier, Tiller was shot in both arms by abortion opponent Rachelle “Shelly” Shannon.
On June 10, 2009, James von Brunn, an eighty-eight-year-old white supremacist, entered the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and opened fire, killing thirty-nine-year-old security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns before being shot in the face by museum security.
The poem’s title comes from “The Community Rule,” one of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran during the mid-twentieth century.
The postcard from J (Johanna Justin-Jinich) to S (Stephen P. Morgan) ends with lines from Neruda’s “Sonnet XX.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals, who first published versions of these poems: the Awl, Barrow Street, Bat City Review, the Believer, the Portable Boog Reader No. 5, Cimarron Review, Eleven Eleven, the New Yorker, Ploughshares, PMS: poemmemoirstory, Tin House, Zoland Poetry No. 4.
“It & Co.” was broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s “Front Row” on October 15, 2010.
“Life on Mars” appears on rolexmentorprotege.com and brooklynpoetry.com.
The penultimate section of “The Speed of Belief” appears, in video format, on badilishapoetry.com as “Water, Shade.”
“The Universe as Primal Scream” appears, in video format, on rolexmentorprotege.com.
I would like to thank Jericho Brown, Tina Chang, David Semanki, Mark Doty, Paul Lisicky, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Thanks also to the generous support of Princeton University and the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative, which contributed to the completion of this book.
TRACY K. SMITH is the author of Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She has received awards from the Rona Jaffe and Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundations and is a protégée in the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Book design and composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acidfree 30 percent postconsumer watstepaper.