The Book of Days If his life had been a novel, he'd have quit reading long ago: characters unbelievable, plot almost building, to fizzle out halfway. A taunted weakling all along, the hero, finally bearing serum to a dying child, only falls asleep in snow, not even real, but bills, paper. He dreams of no back-slapping heaven of parents and wives saying we never thought you had it in you. Not even a dog comes nuzzling through at the last, a wounded wolf befriended in his youth. Maybe one reader, the child he didn't know he had, snowshoeing by. "Here," he gasps pressing the vial into a hand, "Nome. Dying." Bitter, numb already, you turn into the wind. Your problem now. Heart He tells me I'm a risk: he is small, blond, Mississippian. I trust him. I am fighting my genes, he says, fighting my father at fifty-two pulling off the highway that had become a gray blur trying to call to anyone from a phone booth while it broke in his chest, calcified, knobby like an ankle bone and then again, over and over in the hospital while doctors ran up and down the halls trying to stop that sequence of explosions, that string of firecrackers. You see yourself as glass for the first time, transparent, shaken and fizzing, a bottle of soda, and start watching for potholes. Or maybe you just learn to live with a cart with square wheels thudding in your breast trying to carry whatever it is there, before it's too late. This is how to become old--worry only about yourself. So that if there come bombs out of clouds or lovers into rooms, saying goodbyes, learn how to cup your hand around it, as if in a world of wind there is this one candle that must be saved. The Unities on North Avenue I pried them from baseball bats, made them learn my lines, sell tickets, and we swept the red dirt of our dank cellar, strung a curtain (shower), lit stolen candles, called it a tragedy. Somewhere halfway through the plot began to improvise itself, a flock of script taking wing, the spear (rake) used on the wrong end. A wooden sword cleft the gray loaf of yellow jackets who descended like critics, the plastic curtain sizzled black fog. As I rounded the dogwood, mother after me with the rake/spear, I looked back and decided to go into poetry: a frieze, a tableau--Jimmy Jacobs, his cape a still attached and whirling muleta to Poochie the dog, had delicate blond Joe Nelson, who would die at ten, in a headlock, the basement behind spewing ash and smoke, a sacked city, bees swirling around them like golden snow in a crystal ball. The Unities on North Avenue Waxing the car, I straighten up, old in the back, rag in hand, remembering suddenly for some reason Grant Park, its deep hills, a zoo, cyclorama with one slumped soldier half plaster, half paint, his leg stumps blotted with flaking blood, the world around misted with cannon smoke, buzzards, burned pines arrowed in the sides of Atlanta's red wound, invisible choirs humming Dixie. Where my mother took watermelons, busted and ate them with either my father or a sailor named Faris, where her club met the time they hurt her feelings and she dragged me out of the marble pavilion to drive around awhile and cry and they all hugged when we came back. At reunions aunts wore membrane thin flower dresses, gray buns, witches' shoes, and uncles brown suits, snap brim hats, badges and blackjacks. They fried chicken, took black boys to the icehouse, went to war, came home, died. I can smell them like a seance--chicken, sawdust, talcum, gunpowder. And car wax. Did my parents drive there on Sundays after the war? With me asleep in a picnic basket or in her did we polish an old car under the trees as if we all had forever? I'll never know now. Double Feature Tonight they're running it again: I ran in the back yard for days yelling "Shane! Come back Shane!" after I saw it, and just remembered where: we'd leave the house to get there before dark, cool at night in the summer and I cried quietly, mosquitoes and voices in the back seat with me, where I saw "The Thing" huge and strong, vegetable, almost unkillable. Those were the good old days before I got disconnected, like Alan Ladd only far less fast or blonde, more like James Arness, stranded and vicious, bleeding dust when cut. He wore a buckskin shirt and went away because he loved his best friend's wife. When they found him under the ice, my hair rose as they held hands and spread out across the snow, making a hushed circle of that shape, everything I ever wanted to be inside. The Last of the Sheridans He laughed at her, saying "But I'm already in hell." She said, "All right," angry, "you remember the cabin up at the creek, when we'd all go and Opal and Tommie would be there and all the kids, and we'd go dancing every night? Well that's what heaven is. And we'll all be there," she shouted, "and you WON'T." He opened his mouth as if she'd slapped him back for all those times he'd hit his only child with a butcher's hand hard as a bed slat. He was mean as a snake when he was young, she said meaning drunk, beating up black men in the ice house, braining a cuckold with a ketchup bottle like his grandfather, the general who said the only good Indian was a dead Indian. I remember him first a mile high, putting in his dentures, a pink snail curled on a row of pearls, sliding it in and biting with a wet "chuck" looking down and saying "You Irishman, you." He joined the next week as the choir sang "Just As I Am," and mother, crying, dragged me behind her after him down the aisle, went every Sunday after, driving slowly home, the cars lined up for miles on the two-lane road behind his stories as if he didn't hear the curses and the horns. His black neighbor found him in the yard, a small purple stain at the white temple. In the hospital clear tubes made sounds like a straw at the bottom of a cup and he held my hand hard. When she touched him asking "And who is this?" he snuffled out words, eyes closed: "That's my baby," his mouth said, empty, drawn like a purse. She still dreams about him all the time: a little girl again, lying in the cabin at night she hears a band far away playing the "Down Home Rag" till the music dies to nothing, and a fog begins to grow. Somehow human at last his face rises from the blue mist of the night woods and calls her his baby above the sound of rushing water. The Life of the Mind "My, my. A body does get around." --Lena Grove The summer Del Shannon had a hit with "Runaway" I was failing algebra, and my grandfather told the story about slugging his English teacher, jumping out the window to run away and work for the railroad, and eventually have mother who had me. Clark Goswick and I, on the last day of school, before report cards came in the mail, left for Daytona Beach to work on fishing boats and marry Cuban girls, but a cop caught us after only two miles and four hours. As we walked up the driveway, bleeding, our backpacks solid with canned beans and bristling with fishing rods, mother called from the porch "Did they let school out early?" When I fall across my desk stricken, teaching "The Road Not Taken" for the thousandth time an old salt on a dock somewhere in Florida will be splicing rope and telling yarns to the dark children of children. Spider Drill There's this circle of orange earth, the runner having to get across. The coach slammed the ball at me, who looked up and saw Joe, the biggest and meanest in the third grade, in the middle grinning. I still see my running, in Christmas football pants, legs in my mind moving faster than any boy's ever, fly's wings, the ball across my breast like a Bible. On the other side, amazed, I looked back to see him kicking dirt, hating me with his teeth. I trotted to the coach, handed him the ball like a star and woke up face down, laughter in the air like dust, clotting in my mouth and eyes, coach over me, his hand on Joe's shoulder, saying way to go. Don't you NEVER quit. I replay it all the time, only egging Joe on, blindside the kid in the red pants. And more: kick him while he's down, already learning on the ground how there's really only one emotion: huge, sitting in the center, all the deadly sins, and virtues, shame and love, hate and pride, patience, greed, envy, even revenge just legs. Men as Trees, Walking I learned early what that verse meant, "For now we see as through a glass darkly." My mother wouldn't buy me any glasses because then I'd be a foureyes maybe even play in the band like the rest of the pansies, or like my father, polishing his lenses, head bent, hands before his face as if praying, no football hero. Teachers tired of my leaning in from the front row, chalk dust in my hair, begged her in notes: like the blind man in the Bible miracle, he sees men as trees, and trees as lime jello. Going out for passes, I was lost like the end of the world when everybody running sees the sky but me. The coach threw his hat in the dust, "Son, have you EVER caught a pass?" I never did, but when she gave in, let me have my specs, it was like heaven, she even more beautiful with wrinkles, people gross as bears now limber as hickory, spare as willows. And the trees, firmed up, erect at last, were like emerald fish with each scale whole and succinct, as if they would never, ever drop a leaf or a pass. Wedding "Of men are you the most miserable; of women, I." --Medea At the end she'd wake to find him kneeling, head on her lap. You're working yourself to death, she'd say; he, if I didn't have you to come home to, I'd blow my brains out. Thirty years they snarled, circled a bone, sometimes me, some days my sister, or money. If you were a real man was on our coat of arms, with never marry and there is no happiness, Nullus Felicitas Est. So I crave sorrow like home cooking, need to walk an aisle between people dressed for it, someone in white robes and blood red emblems saying words over it, the dead mailing lead crystal, cut glass doorknobs that don't fit for as long as we both shall live. Another Marriage "When you're lonely, praise the great lovers: the fame of their loving still isn't known enough." --Rilke When my father died my mother and I got drunk every night, told each other secrets, why I really left my wife that he cut the tips out of all her bras, why he wouldn't go fishing all those mornings, on the beach together with a Polaroid while I slept. He left her nothing, like that old joke, she laughed I've got money enough for the rest of my life, if I die tomorrow. At the funeral the preacher said I know how much you'll miss him. How much I'll miss it, she said. He thought she meant money, I thought the house she would lose, the cooking and polishing she loved, but she meant "it," like in novels and poetry about dead lovers, how everything apparently ends and you're left like her the day after, or him the day before, swallowing tablets, stalling, pouring foam on their burning hearts, both of them with enough pain to last until they died, if they never did. Milledgeville Castles of red brick in the rain, where my "Granny" was, who thought the jets flew over to take pictures of her clothesline of old panties. Things she said made the newspapers: "There," she'd say, triumphant, "I TOLD you they were listening." From the fireplace. She could stay there till death, or they could cut, a fifty fifty chance, the first one. Downstairs at night my father shouted against his sisters. "Be it on YOUR head then," they said. He took us to see her, maybe the last time, walking into old light like yellow dust, lampshades, cracked green walls, a room of sofas and steel bars. She cried and called him Billy, a child, "Take me home." I looked just like him, her Billy. She wore a flimsy flower print, for Sunday, black shoes like a witch's, pointed bun of white hair. Somewhere way off inside there was groaning, other crying. Your parents always said, "If you don't behave we'll send you to Milledgeville." Now I know it was real, where Flannery O'Connor lived with her mother and peacocks that called like souls at dusk, remember how we left her sobbing out "lobotomy" all the way back down the hall, and the next day, how it showed up in all the papers. A1A When we hit that highway in Jacksonville a veil parted into an otherness five hundred miles and ten days from August's red dirt, scrub pine and football practice, where my mother wanted an athlete, and the coach wanted a state championship. Skinny, timid, I just wanted a stay of execution mixed of crushed bleached shells and tar, blown and puddled with white sand, running all the way down the coast just behind one long dune, a green rampart of sea oats and Spanish bayonet, Florida's groves of water oak and olive even at noon black, clustered, gnarled Greek women whispering together, shade caves of rusted cutlasses, eye patches, pieces of eight falling spangled through twigs onto the rooted gray sand carpeted with brown scalloped leaves. Fronds rattled all night in the salt wind and neon palms blinked red, green red, green. Motels, Moorish, Tahitian, flashed vacancy, their hula girls flickering hips back and forth, the boardwalk over the beach pouring pastel candy cotton, apple smells and the heavy oil of hamburgers, onions corn dogs, boiled crabs. The screaming rides calliopes, drowned the hissing of the surf. Every morning we drove, our car full of coffee steam and canned milk, to the pier stilted out over the green waves, its boards strewn with translucent pink confetti, bits, baby fingernails of shrimp shell and fish scale, cobbles of lead sinkers crusted with salt, snarled blond nests of old nylon line. We never caught anything, but the whole ocean was always there in case. And the fishing camp muffled with stained sawdust, where we watched the throbbing boats come in, throw colored bowed fish, sliding in ice slime onto the dock, a shark hanging on a hook, its gray bark I reached out to touch with one finger a dark deep-sea pool with fins gliding, giant turtle that raised its beaked head to pshaw spray into the warm air above where we walked across a wooden bridge afraid we were falling through the cracks. It was always there, summer after summer the same until that last year riding in on the first day, there all along, one thing too many, a field bulldozed free of palms and palmetto, where they practiced football, the year I noticed that the blue scrolled sign of our motel, the Shangra La, was spelled without an "i." My Last Father Poem Every Saturday he was bent over the plastic voice of our radio, the kitchen filling down with the blue smoke of Camels, oiled black curls falling through the thin fingers that held his brow. They were losing again, where they taught about flying, or building the planes. But his Welsh father would only pay for a seminary, until there was mother, then the war, then me. While I grew up in his father's house he delivered telegrams, sometimes on campus, came back and told me how they all wore yellow satin jackets and sliderules on their belts. Or went and sat alone at night above the grain yellow rink he was tall enough to play in. When only one college would take me, tiny, far from home, "No. That's real good," he said. "They always lose." Which meant to him they only took the best. Too Far to Walk Preachers spend half their lives in empty churches, stopping by with their sons on the way downtown to ball games. I hear his voice far off, echoing, muffled in a small room below-- he's stained with violet ink, cursing the mimeograph machine, or the folder that mangles paper. In the pitiful library, I look at Michelangelo's women, cracked sepia breasts, plump pears between their thighs, the finger of naked Adam reaching out to God. The summer janitor at thirteen, I swept the hundred rooms of concrete floors, metal chairs, shredded hymnals, gray window light, the silence of stone. On the block walls were palm trees letting down spears of light and Jesus drinking with the woman at the well, walking on water, pointing to his own heart. I dreamed of Brenda Wilkie, underneath her white choir robe. In my worst dreams I'm stranded halfway between that red brick, city church and home as the sun begins to set. I can remember all the turns the car used to make to get back into the suburbs, but I'm walking and get lost, wander up ever more branching roads into the hills past the tangled cemetery where my grandmother lies, into those neighborhoods where night always falls on crumbled roads twisting among houses with high grass and all the windows dark. Atlantis This is the grave where I buried my father, as if he could see blue Kennesaw over there, where Johnston dug in like a gentleman to have it out, the big gundown, a duel. Sherman just marched around him, cut him off, on to Atlanta to burn. It grew back over, a skin, a fur of honeysuckle and kudzu I could grow in. Now each subdivision's named something station or landing, Civil War chic, new highways squirming, red earth sucked to the top and bleeding in the rain, that K-Mart there in the hill's side as if gouged by cannon, the boom of traffic. Other than onion rings at The Varsity, Brunswick stew at Old Hickory, nothing beside remains, though I dream my father, on summer nights, ringed with shopping centers, sits in the cool grass, feels the yellow ghost of honeysuckle, watches flares and campfires up on the mountain like fireflies, the besieged still holding out, praying o city that murders my prophets, o blue general with fire come home. Where We've Been "Tell us where you're going then, so when you get there, we can tell everyone where you've been." --a grandfather to his grandson in Crickhowell, Wales I see the small, boy figure of Gwilym, my grandfather, consumptive, climbing out of Wales, over and past these gray, bouldered hills, away from the black dust toward London then onto a ship around the world. Pieces are missing, how a cabin boy became a cowboy in Australia, came to lay rails in America, ending up in Georgia's mountains, Methodist circuit rider, why aeronautics engineering wasn't good enough for Bill his son who wanted to fly, that he must become another preacher. He rebelled too late, a grounded accountant marking the soaring of other people's money, his crisp two's and five's a flock of geese, flight of arrows, checks down the long columns. At forty he became a preacher so old and self taught no church would have him, one voice without a wilderness. Don't make my mistake, he said, start early. At thirty-five I come back to Wales, coal mines gone, to wonder if we're meeting, knowing ourselves for the first time, strangers sharing only a weak chin, small mouth and name, or joined deeper by an endless ability to hope making all three of us lost together. Pit Pony There are only a few left, he says, kept by old Welsh miners, souvenirs, like gallstones or gold teeth, torn from this "pit," so cold and wet my breath comes out a soul up into my helmet's lantern beam, anthracite walls running, gleaming, and the floors iron-rutted with tram tracks, the almost pure rust that grows and waves like orange moss in the gutters of water that used to rise and drown. He makes us turn all lights off, almost a mile down. While children scream I try to see anything, my hand touching my nose, my wife beside me--darkness palpable, a velvet sack over our heads, even the glow of watches left behind. This is where they were born, into this nothing, felt first with their cold noses for the shaggy side and warm bag of black milk, pulled their trams for twenty years through pitch, past birds that didn't sing, through doors opened by five-year-olds who sat in the cheap, complete blackness listening for steps, a knock. And they died down here, generation after generation. The last one, when it dies in the hills, not quite blind, the mines closed forever, will it die strangely? Will it wonder dimly why it was exiled from the rest of its race, from the dark flanks of the soft mother, what these timbers are that hold up nothing but blue? If this is the beginning of death, this wind, these stars? New Testament I'd never be that way, white-haired and prophetic stern as Solomon, with full pockets. He'd bend over and out would fall pens. He'd pick them up and his notebooks would drop, then the tiny green Bible. He'd bend to pick them up and out would fall pens. Good night alive, he'd shout almost a saint except for the squatting mimeograph machine his own pockets and his son. And mother liked James Dean, so for years it was easy: long hair, leather jackets, guitars, anything he wasn't. Until things began to fall. I made sure they were cigarettes, small airline liquor bottles, prophylactics switchblades. Graying, I bent groaning today in the new asphalt street to tie my hushpuppy: the ball of ice cream tilted out, then the ball point pens, then another ragged poem. I stood with an empty cone in the center of the littered black street and said God damn him, and tried to mean it. Visitation I'd been there before, knew when I stepped off the plane, a hick, into the air-conditioned air. There was smog, yes, but something else, a tang--eucalyptus, burning brush in the sun, a cool musk blowing off a northern sea that the folds of the desert hills poured into, congealing like lava. The freeways bald and ugly, rolled themselves by blue waves flecked with the jade pods of kelp, cold brine and a beach the color of flesh. At evening crepe myrtle, mimosa, hibiscus, frangipani trailed tentacles, scarlet cupped, and the scent of warm sage, shades of conquistadors in pewter, boulevards of heron-crested palms leaned in, all my movies, Saturday matinees, confused: Tom Mix zinging bullets off of boulders just over the hill from the beast with a million eyes, giant ants and the San Andreas fault, a lavender stain of sand sliding quietly south by San Jacinto like a mountain of the moon. The radio sifted the air for a song, "Riders On the Storm," the notes flickering stars above Mount Palomar, a crowd with candles shouting jump to someone on a ledge, white-robed congregations at night in blind canyons, lights of L.A., a pond of phosphorescent motes seen from mountains of coyotes, howling. I told no one my vision--the earth dirty dangerous and holy--except once: a group laughing on the beach, brown, wet with oil and floured with sand. They loved my accent and made me say it over and over, like a cowboy star of the thirties or something from another world. Cain That old cracked couple down the street could be Adam and Eve, still, the way they tend their fat acre, or the Poe story, keeping death out: ramparts of azalea, jonquil pikes, corner spumes of white dogwood. Maybe death will NEVER win, their rich thumbs sprout, grass swarm over the mound of grave. So why are they afraid? They see it as smut, a mildew, something that shows up in place of the milkman, sniffing all the color from their flowers, slobbering all over the jade shrubs, peeing a stain in brown runnels of blight through the veins and arteries of their tough St. Augustine. They even keep its runners in, stack their gritty borders with concrete block lest something park and watch. From their glass breakfast porch they would hold each other, shaking free fists at it, they way they cross to the other side when they pass my rented yard with its plastic chair among the dead leaves, broken limbs and bicycles in the shadow of the shaggy copper beech that has been rust from the beginning. Advent On the road past Lake Serene, someone has torn down the bridge out sign, and while pickups doze in the blacktop lots of shouting south Mississippi churches, we drive on across concrete spillways, our tires hushed in water, looking at the mansions and the leaves until we come to the new bridge of broken white wafers down in the red gorge the lake seeps through to become a stream again. Since we have to stop anyway, we get out to look for pine cones to fill Christmas baskets. Fresh fallen from the storm last night they're hard, unopened, pink as flesh, long thin pineapples. Like crusts of bread they lead us along the bluff, layered like orange desert cliffs, and around to the lake, the shallow end away from the yachts and boat docks, to where mud has cracked in autumn's low water. Now a grid of slick gray tiles furred with evergreen lies beneath clear water only inches deep. Mussels, fat brown parabolas etched with rings like trees, bubble between the cracks. On the shore, in sand, we see tracks of raccoon, watching us from the pine dark woods, and the shells they've beaten open with both paws and left in the sun to be pearl butterflies everywhere. Out in the lagoon, navy, rippled with the cold north wind, are thousands of logs, stumps, each knobbed with turtles. Back at the car we thump the pine cones into the trunk and open a mussel, part the thin lips to show us something inside: wet, soft, curled like a small tongue of glycerin and amber. Nails I'm taking apart a packing crate in the back yard, building a bookcase of the pieces, hoping my wife will come back and see what I was, though I've told her often enough. It must be the smell of pine, the scraps we burned in barrels, shivering, climbing in the morning out of the purple shadow up on that beached skeleton of yellow bones, the heaped mud below us flecked with nails, into the parallel gold bars of sun above the trees, slippery rime on the boards, glistening snail tracks, until the sun thawed it to damp the wood a shade darker, pulpy as stale bread to the nails, ringing slightly when you let the hammer do the work, if you're good, just lifting it to fall, going in deep with one blow, the boards blond as women, lime streaked with grain, powdered with the fine dust our saws give off into the morning like pollen. Splinters, and drops of blood like blots of rust. Insects grow louder as the sun rises. We throw aluminum cans of water underarmed, lateraled like footballs, silver bullets twirling, throwing off curls of the water that tastes like sugar, metal cold in the throat. She comes around the house bringing lemonade and stays to watch. I begin to tell the story again as things start to bend and tear. I begin to sweat, saying I used to ... do this ... for a living but my story, like this project is going nowhere, and she yawns. Your stories go nowhere too, I say, the famous England trip, hiking in the Rockies, the alleged year you spent as a waitress, you, who've broken every dish in the house. But she just laughs and goes back in. Now the nails straighten again by themselves and sink into the wood forever, shining, hidden. A Cat in Eden They make fun of our spoiling her, felt catnip toys, canned escargot, a tiny wine list. But her forerunner got hit chasing squirrels in the street because we wanted her to be free, happy, the one we raised by hand with a doll's bottle she sucked and chewed, her blind mouth brimming with evaporated milk. She made a nest in my hair at night, and I had fleas for months, long after she was dead. This one wears a harness and leash she drags around the yard all day like a small, abandoned sled dog. Most of the time she just sits, miserable humiliated, as if she's being forced to wear a hat. We keep a broomstick handy for dogs and snakes. They only live ten or twelve years anyway, at the most, but we want to bury her wrinkled arthritic, bored though she sits for hours thinking, scheming of a breakout, dreaming of mice and trashcans hating our guts. We could care less: we don't philosophize anymore--we just patrol. Senior Year "But I don't love HIM. I love YOU." I turned to see her within the morning shade of a small tree, standing as if she'd just stamped her foot, arms crossed, holding together her trembling yellow dress. His head was bowed. They were being miserable, but o what misery. The butler, I walked on. Hadn't heard a thing. Though it's still warm, fall has begun, the sun already slanting in the afternoon, flaring the brick buildings orange and gold, one or two leaves turning early, here a dot of russet, mauve. The evenings are sentimental, smells of woodsmoke and something invisible just beginning, blooming too late. Hearing winter, sick cats push at my window tonight to be fed, broken-winged birds struggle out in the dark, fish with eyes hooked sink, their scales releasing the summer moon. Wounded things begin to ache before it snows and all the books I've ever read weigh tons, and that's outside the mind. High Rise I've never been this far above the earth as now returning to the city of my birth. Far off to the south out the plate glass window of the fifty-seventh floor, the red brick project where I was conceived, across the street the college my father couldn't afford, the jade pool of football field where I sold cokes. How appropriate it would be to die here on this brief and single visit above it all, remember fires on T.V., hotels like this burning like matches, all smoke alarms and sprinklers no comfort. I imagine air bags like biscuits down in the street, if I could hit one, aim straight enough, have the courage to jump and live, or die. Before sleep I pray: for the one I left for no good reason, that I don't fall, for the two orphans my sister adopted then gave up when she left her husband, if they're still out there somewhere below me in the dark, three of the lights theirs. To sleep I imagine catching passes, but feel no earth beneath my feet only the hum of this tower in wind, dream only of falling. As I dress to go home, dawn reddens the city like a dig in Pompeii so that I could step out into it, kneel and brush with one finger from the streets between cinnamon roofs red dust to find within one brick doll's house my mother, still curled on her first bed afraid that if she gets up the seed won't take. I pull from my coat the long blond hair of my wife remembering Lawrence's mother, how her one white strand floated up the chimney into nothing. From my pants I brush the short gray hairs from my own head, the pale banded filaments of cats. They all float down to the floor of the fifty-seventh floor. Outside clouds are forming, coming toward me as if I were one of them, one of those souls that fly up like clouds out of the dead, or the just beginning to be. Two-Dream Sonnets I. I was a child again. In the park a girl with blond hair watched only me. I could tell she loved me. Dream children are lamed so they can't follow you home, but I got lost, ankles in sawdust when the barker stopped me, towering above, pointing to the tent side painted with the giraffe people, the woman rose tattooed, then the green tiny earth in a blue pond circled by some kind of blond bird on a string. Blood red caption: Mandolin Music in Space! II You flew my kite. Blood red silk formed a rose, the green stem a tail. It nodded in the wind all day, a lily tethered in a stream I watched until dark when passion made us grow: lying in grass we strained lips, limbs like giraffes for leaves, twined necks, became a tower on the hill. Silence haunted this desire, though ghosts, wind, and the wings of birds whispered. Essays They are splayed in front of me like a new hand of cards, thirty each bending to the topic, the major problem facing college freshmen, and I wonder what on earth I would write, probably remember first the second semester, chosen to room with the one they all adored, filling the shower with guitar chords and steam, sitting up on the gravel roof and watching cars from the late shift at the quarry go home, running naked to steal honeysuckle from the dean's bush and piling it high on the desk we never used, the others coming by just to smell it, closing back the door without a word until it faded, brown tendrils limp, jade leaves dusty, the window open in the spring afternoon blowing scent and cream flowers down the hall. Singing hits all night "The Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love," "Did You Hear the Lonesome Whipporwill," sleepers beating time on our walls, the house mother almost crying, you've got to stop singing that bird song. We laughed at her and swaggered off through half a year. But of the first I would write only of my father leaving me there, a room in a house so dark I dreamed only of death, hiding in the basement of the dorm, and then home at Christmas, riding to the hospital, moaning over and over, not she doesn't love me anymore, but "alone" over and over, surprised as if this was all I'd learned or how people only love the people they won't let themselves have or that from out of where you cut your arms what there is of you to hurt passes forever like blood leaving white tubes that don't need anything just to go on writing how I somehow still sit each night on top of that house watching the night shift wind like pairs of stars down that hill, around that house that is alone, on the hill that is still alone in that country on this same old earth that always hangs in the night until it's time to hand these papers in and go home. Natchez Trace Four hours from the city is a way through the first forest. Within a tunnel of trees moccasins and oxen hooves walked it down until the land around makes walls laced with roots. Paved with leaves the road dips to cross streams pebbled like separate trails we walk in all directions, barely wetting our feet. We see raccoon tracks two by two, the twin blades of shy deer spoor, red squirrels boring deep into the boles of trees turning gold, fogged blue in the morning with the smoke of the hardwood fires of our waking, shivering to pack up and go. Tomorrow the leaves will be one shade brighter, changing all the cold night for us, at home, angry again. In Autumn We were camping. He came out of the woods, thin, scarred shivering as he walked. We fed him spaghetti, salami, stale bread he ate till almost dead and buried the rest, knowing winter, how no one comes to sleep by the lake. We found wood to burn in a grove of oak, cut and left to rot. He stayed in darkness, beyond the fire. Headlights came at midnight, halloing. He cowered as if the voice were over him with a stick. We kept quiet, hiding, but the pickup came down, asking about a liver-spotted hound. Seeing the twelve-gauge, we said no dog here. When we left he ran after us partway up the road. Today it is full winter, gray and drizzling, even up on that acre of rotting trees, on that lake where no one comes but hunters calling home their dogs. Scout I stalk the nature trail trying to see deer or even a rabbit. The leaves still wet I creep like moccasins when suddenly I hear something coming on the trail ahead. Had I a rifle I'd have shot a young doppelganger, red bandannaed. He says as we pass you think you're alone out here? You've got a surprise coming about a hundred yards up. About a hundred yards up a hundred boy scouts are waking screaming, chasing through the woods casting lures into trees burning bacon. A scoutmaster, mounty cap crooked on his head sits wrapped in a khaki blanket his face sleeping in his hands while green and yellow tents sag everywhere radios twang and clumsy fires pour up blue smoke. I used to beg my mother to let me join, go on these trips, but she thought I was too frail. Old as the scoutmaster I am finally learning to camp dreaming in my tent of grizzlies burning my fingers chopping my feet. I see one trying to fill a plastic jug with a two-handed pump. He looks alone here, not a member of anybody's gang. I hold the jug like a scoutmaster would while he pumps and tells me about the hike they took yesterday so long even MY feet begin to ache. We fill the jug, look at his blisters, tighten up his tent and then sit down by his smudge of fire. Glad of the company he offers me black bacon and a slice of toast spread with cold butter and ashes like pepper. When I leave he goes to show the way I'd lost, pointing from the fork we come to and is still there, smaller standing in a spot of sun at the first bend before I go into the deepest part of the woods. On the Bridge Fishing, our lanterns hung just above the slick black water made holes filled with fish, squirming eels in a barrel of yolk. Offshore, the oil rigs crouched, steel mosquitoes, their needles syphoning out the long dead and fishing boats inside the reef illegally, running lights off used the moon instead rising red and swollen through air sifted with volcanic ash. Dolphins in the bay circled and charged again and again with ivory teeth into the shoals of trout busy snapping minnows and shrimp on the surface, and sometimes our hooks that snagged them up to beat off their scales on the loose gravel of the bridge with the bloody moon rising over hooks and nets everywhere, things leaping into hoops of light appearing almost glad to die. After the Fox Each day they try to hold the island that's moving, folding, crawling like an octopus back to mainland. Finger paring, it's dissolving to the invisible quick. Bulldozer noise is a surf, choppers hover with the gulls. The beach is fished out this year from mud-dredge and a hard freeze. Up here on the night bridge fewer than ever come to lanterns pasting a jade ball on the tidal river, hanging mosquitoes for minnows, then shrimp flipping for trout: first the first of their flash, then shades weaving the falling tide someone down the bridge, their bending down face, reflected yellow moon, whispering there they are, here rising, here sperm squirming in a yolk, snapping foam. They hover, seem to be swimming like hounds ran back when there were foxes, if you caught in helicopter searchlight their streaming from the spool, forming, flattening to take a hedge, thinning like water through rocks spinning filaments through trees, resuming the skein on the other side, not running but riding land-flow beneath. This is how they hold the tide, though the rigs offshore flare their gas-burn wells, illegal black-boats drag their trawls, how they will come back every night to our lamps for years even when they is only one left or one light left to come to. Reunion It's New Orleans but it isn't. There's no heat, no black mud levee just cool jade grass declining to the clear Mississippi, cobalt blue flowing so shallow over sand that we can wade across. And trees everywhere, but no houses only small grocery stores in the groves of water oak, in the shade of Spanish moss with formica tables where old friends can sit and drink beer who haven't seen each other for years. Some of us are even dead so that we could easily cry about this last chance except we're shy and speak only of how much weight we've lost how good we still look. We know we are only dreaming have met in a nexus of time and night so why, as we talk, explain, apologize, do we smile with a secret, as if summoned to this heaven by our need for each other again as if one of us sent out a call? By the river on the night of the twenty-fifth and don't be late. Custer = "Buffalo Bill's defunct" You were born into it, certitude, like the air you came into, waiting to breathe, the lemon color of your hair, the teeth you assumed. Everything after fell in line--a white horse high stepping to Gary Owen," a wife who needed you like bread, the eyes of a country. You knew--looking at women, drawing a bead, or an ace, but unsatisfied, itchy, there was still a catch a skip, still in the breast, a stutter, priming your heart, turning the head at odd moments, expecting a door, something to enter, go through. And then you saw your first indian and finally showed that famous smile everything around you dead. Acclaim I've been there when five have tied a game, pistol hands going off, revolution, emotion rising to the dome like fog, tear gas, red ants swarming. Only tenors and athletes get that instant backwash, echo of greatness slapped from a cliff face back, the ball, high C going through touching nothing at all. What about Keats then, just after, say, the Grecian Urn, nobody, nothing but a sagging candle, there that late. Old silence. Or maybe the sound when silence is shifted one cog over by a poem, as though you'd turned the wheel left, went right and for a second where are you? As if the wrought iron bench, beneath you in the sunny side- walked, bird, bicycle, new leaved, skates and flowered park, its lion paws set in warm concrete that twines steel tap roots down, were by a single thought just ever so slightly moved. Our Father Who Art On Third "After all he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it." --"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" I stopped praying years ago, learned how to think instead of love, or the icy mountains before death, green fields beyond. Now I need a quiet god, not to make the heart rattle, a golf ball in a cup. Baseball fits best, almost as if designed in sleep: the pickoff, brush back, squeeze, suicide squeeze, stealing. It's no heaven--it's here: slick skin and stitches of the ball in hand reminding me of Ebba St. Claire, Atlanta Cracker catcher built like crossed trees, showing us how to throw, the ball an egg in the knotted roots of his fingers. If he never made it, how can we? Yet I wear before sleep the welts and wrinkles of a glove, dream hand, grip the bone handle of a Louisville Slugger, slap clay from my spikes and go toward the dark as to home, playing for the bunt, the sacrifice. Before This Happened, God "God is love." Before this happened, God was something inside, familiar, warm as an organ. Now it's far away, white-haired and thunderous, a dirt dam I plug stormy nights on my knees that sickness won't balloon into death, that accidents swerve and carom around us, the vessel in my wife won't burst, my heart get sulky and tired, the wrong woman show up. All good tragedies are those of love, and therefore God, inside of us yet still outside, like dreams of dams bursting overhead, tornadoes circling, things, rising from dark swamps, red eyed, taloned, coming closer. Five Cliches We see her in the K-Mart housewares department buying an o god no, and look away fast, one of those freak accidents, the way drunken cowboys pass out in the middle of a west Texas prairie night, the sun spotting their bondoed pickups neatly on the rails until the once-a-week express slices their dreams in half. But this is trying to be art, this poem, imitate her life better than it's been imitating Modern Romances--twitching a blonde coed across the path of her lying hound of a husband. So now, just a little too late to start over, she'll step out of her house of new kids onto her new K-Mart doormat, and her own sidewalk's banana peel will skid her into the street to kiss the Mack truck that's been coming down through the language for years. I bet they find one of her pink jogging shoes almost a mile away. Title Harry, Hilary, John, I get the names all wrong, say them for good morning, see their smiles sag and disappear. Later I know I've called them wrong, as if I didn't know or care. And how can I go back and make it up, make it good? Tell them what is wrong and always was, how often I hear fuses shorting and snapping, see only a question mark of smoke puff from a gray box on the house's white side, how it hangs and blows away in morning wind into green, the spring trees lime-green and thick? How I dream, names changed, Philip my wife losing her fine dark hair, Mary my mother, bearded, or Don with her breasts, my dead father who comes tired to me each night, the one I embrace saying lover, friend? The District of Looking Back I've seen too many, interviews where they remember exactly forever what they were doing when it happened. I had just opened a) the door b) a beer c) my Bible to Deuteronomy when I heard the explosion/growl/roar like a freight train, thud like thunder shaking the house. Where were we when Kennedy was shot? Where was Sheila Grahame but in the kitchen, Scott standing by the mantelpiece, taking out a carton of milk, lighting a cigarette. So I keep trying this way to live as if each moment were the last: now I'm putting on my shorts. I had just put on my shorts. The way you run a tape forward to the good parts, what came just before and who cares what just after. There's a part of Jamaica so rough all the men wear their black sharkskins striped with the slick ebony of razor welts. They call it we no send, you no come from the days they rode back to back, two to a horse, the front one always saying how he heard the thump, then the shot itself just as he'd turned the bend. "But all I saw was where I was going. And the poor bastard never even knew where he was, only where he'd been." And maybe this is the way we keep leaving each day, each moment, as if we'd never been, except for the one where we must stay, like getting off at a station or bend that will be that second forever, for us and for the other left to remember just what they were doing when they turned and we were gone. Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear For a long time I kept dreaming my wife died suddenly. She'd step on a board that would crack and down she'd go, getting smaller, my heart with her, mouth still trying to say even the first syllable of her name. I would never know it was coming: we'd be in England walking a castle wall, she'd step out on some scaffolding to rescue a kitten before I could stop her. Or onto a slick green stone in the river above falls. And then she really almost did, one second fishing by me in the sun, then the emergency room, the doctor saying something's certainly going on in there. Inside you laugh like a bad step on a gravel roof. Then a step to right yourself that doesn't hold. But you were gone from the first, that slight sway from dead center to where gravity is waiting: Walesa on the high wire in the wind, dropping his pole then himself like an ice cream cone, the space shuttle, another bottle rocket. Or you try to split the difference between two semi's slamming like doors: the silence while you ride limp as a rag the crest of a wave, watching the spot where you'll hit, heart beating fastest just before it stops. Movies make it almost leisurely: the bullet smacks, you reel, wobble, spin, stagger, fall in someone's arms. They hold your head while you name names: trap door, banana peel, frog tongue. Burial What is it after all but a judgement, a pronouncement? Someone has to say "He's dead," and someone always does, but if they are still here, that is, the body, then they are still here. Eyes closed, perhaps heart stopped, of course. But what if no one said it, made that decision? We would notice a lapse of words, a slight slumping of the body, a pause in the air of the room. We would go on talking until, tired, we went home, calling their house out of habit for years. If we badly needed to know what only they knew, like the name of an obscure actor, or a book, we could go to them and ask. Until it got too ugly. Eventually, every thought of them would trip on the certainty: that where they were there was still silence. We would stop going, stop calling. This is death then. Not them, not their decaying, as we all do, or their thinking deep in the eyes as if quiet for some reason, but only us, our giving up. Sea Change When the doctor told me I went to the bathroom sat down and wept on the tall toilet for the sick and dying. Wept. Crying's for babies, mashed thumbs, not for the world like a bruised grape or a fisted eye. The tile room filled slowly up with grief, a roar in my ears, submarine. But as low as I was, you were still below me, sedated, sleeping, or talking with eyes closed, beyond pain, sinking, wrapped in white, your hair a coral fan on the pillow. All I wanted to tell you, serious, desperate from that height was my love and guilt, something you, growing deeper, darker, already didn't need, the vein into that pale, floating arm a tether to your new current leaving me to drown for years. Son and Heir You came uninvited, a stark and slimy, inconvenient thing we couldn't throw out, two romantics as we are. So we raise you in this sty, this poverty without hope of prospects or college only words and food from cans. You'll hate my guts, I knew that from the beginning. Maybe you'll even be the one to finally punch me out, split my lip when I pitch a fit, screaming at your mother. You'll yell you selfish pig, and I'll turn and play my ace, saying coldly, levelly I never wanted you. But for now I walk you back and forth at 2 a.m. Angry at this intrusion on my liquor, late movies, and poems I shake you a little too hard. But you don't cow you just wrinkle in your red face and blow a scream back at me, already letting into my mouth the bitterness of blood. Nothing's Been the Same Since John Wayne Died My world isn't hers, skin like mocha she climbs into each morning, air pouring through her throat clear as creekwater, no line where brown legs slide into silk shorts. She's my student but I'm in class now, aerobics, flunking in a room of convex mirrors and dumbbells, though she's patient, pities me, the sounds I make for air. It's hopeless as a dancing bear, Disney hippo in a tutu, a friend's father. She wants to pop candy in my mouth when I do something right. Cigarettes smell like burning celery, liquor is shellac, her heart has a slow beat and sticks to it, she can bench press me. I sort of pity HER, daughter I never had, how far she has to go, how dirty and heavy. But she's perfect now, and even her hard music gets under my fat, sets my frog leg jumping in jean stores. She's working hard to get me young I'm aging her fast and three times a week we keep meeting here. It's What You Said You Wanted My old fishing buddy calls to ask if I still want that skull, that a guy's in town selling them at a plastic surgeons' convention. Forty to two hundred dollars each, depending on how many teeth are left unbroken. He buys in India but will have to stop in August, a new law. I tell him no, that that was when I thought death was cute, like Sarah Bernhardt, with her Hamlet prop and sleeping every night in a coffin, before all those hours in the hospital doing crosswords, afraid to read a novel in case I ran across words like "love, " or "alone," or "wife." Before she opened her eyes and said it looks like you're finally going to be free. Or before I quit smoking and started jogging because the man in the next room, gross and wheezing, was swelling every day, slowly exploding like something already dead in the sun. Before I found out I was happy and always have been. Pretty soon, my friend says, all skulls will be plastic, and we talk about fishing again in the Gulf, how we're going to stand waist deep in that jade water, how we're going to bust those trout, really put ants on them, how we're going to let them go. The Best Days of Your Life All those commercials pushing zest, out lusting each other for life. Soon they'll come on holding a can and have a fit, as if last second a million beings hadn't died. There. Another legion, souls fizzing from cancers like tire air, an extra thousand little brown balloons gone from the lands where the dirt is cracked like lips. Next second or the next a billion bugs will conclude, applauded from this life, round off incarnations, they hope, fireflies shush into dark like matches in water, small animals furred and shelled just pop on the highways, champagne corks on the edge of a new year that's always happening, interstates of hearts stopping, seizing black engines out of oil. Slugged bodies falling down the sky, bulldozed, floating up, blood vessels puffing and splitting, but you'd never know by watching television, which is why they talk about life being such a wonderful thing, and it is, at least mine is. The Teeth You Want to Keep After I hit thirty, I found I began looking forward to it, even the cartoon lion saying floss only the teeth you want to keep. He tells me they use it to string agate beads it's so strong. The needle is somewhere in my head, the cobra cyclops peering at me over his shoulder, war of the worlds. The pain hides like a pin in a haystack in the next county, but will come back later with drums. I give off dust like a quarry and his fingers smell like Dachau. Outside, air comes into my mouth half cold, half hot, and my ringing right ear hears me from across the room thanking him around the oyster of my tongue, lisping that while pain is good this is better. Body and Soul A long time we've known each other. I worried how thin you were, how chalky soft your bones, so ugly, sharp nose, tiny mouth like a carp's, weak chin. We grew apart because you couldn't keep up. But you did keep calling, sometimes drunk, long distance, your whining bad lungs whistling, another sore that wouldn't heal, a new growth ballooning, your heart heavy as a black anvil in a crate of ribs, twinges like blue thorns on cold vines lacing through your arms, in your ears the noise of crickets in dry grass. I listened to your fear just the way I did when I cared. But now your calls wake me like stabs in the dark. I turn on the lamp to tell you before hanging up, turning back off the light, if you're going to go, go. New Orleans, 1983 I've been there. In another room a woman laughs, but the lime-green fields are rice, the black clouds monsoons coming across the Bay of Bengal whipping orange saris along the plain of beach, a temple ruined in jade, vines strung with red monkeys, stones of steps going down into the brown Ganges, white cattle in the streets, golden curry, woman's violet lips, that forehead spot, third eye. A boy, stinging their flanks with a bamboo pole drives water buffalo at dusk, a man walking with a smiling girl traces something with his hands--a passion, a memory:gray moss above a black river, snakes with the marks of diamonds, red dust, cotton. Karma In my other life, I stayed up all night, in charge of the moon in the clearing, where the sticks got up and joined hands and danced. I had a crown of clover and baby's breath and sweet minions and I presided sitting on a soft mushroom, drinking moonshine from an acorn cup till dawn when I was put to snore between the roots of a great tree. This went on for three hundred years and I died. I woke up human, and Baptist, in Atlanta, Georgia-- which shows you what can happen when you don't pay attention. Stress Test The Indians say, it's a good day to die: grass smelling like watermelon, wind blowing yellow flour. I sign a pink tissue that will swear if I drop dead it's no one's fault but my own, unsaid the mountains of butts and bottles, the doctor pitying me like a sinner--he's brown and spare as a monkey or astronaut. Young girl-jocks in ballet tights paste their soft leeches to my chest, and the treadmill narrow as a beam starts flowing, waits for no man. Out flows the plastic paper of my every second, peaks, and valleys when the body pauses, debates like a fist whether ever to open again, pull in like a swimmer before the breast's stroke. Soon the leather river has beaten me, I'm winded. "Are you through," she says. They wrap the tape around my ruby vial of blood and I leave knowing the results as I walk toward home, looking, like a man for his keys, for anything else, one more image: maybe that old car, its cushion sticking from the bottom slit of the door, caught like a tongue. Receipt Hang on to these. Someday you may need them. Say you think she looked at you like a god, that dresses were orange, flowers yellow, eyes blue grass green gazebo white brass band red. Or when exactly was it? Then, you say, no, Sunday she says, so you find our packet you have carefully saved, Your Memories Enclosed. See? It's the rolling-in clouds that are yellow, your face green. Brass flowers, she is blue. Red lightning forks behind your unfocused face, it's too dark, some shadow gestures, which she turns to touch like a god, you were old and alone like you are now but don't remember it that way, so you look deep into the amber negatives for your self. The squares are empty as Sunday morning. Thank you for your order. Concentration Camp I was hungry, we all were hungry the world was defined by hunger. There was wire round in our skulls and coiled in stomachs. They gave us something for the body our minds were worse. In England as I walked my fingers brushed the bindings which never seem to end. Though sirens divide the night my bed is empty my body invisible smiles at the black sentry. What I learn I let go with the wind and the wind goes over the wire. The Weaning It starts with little things-- a blue web belt from the Navy, a book of the greatest chess games, a boy scout knife with ten blades. You suspect that this time they have not been lost, or mislaid, or left somewhere, but subtracted, that something has begun erasing, like cyphers, like tracks, the curios of your history starting back at the first and gaining on you every day. When you begin to miss certain people, you know the house itself is next or the street of green trees. One morning when you wake it will be color and you will wander for days in snow before, suddenly, even the whiteness goes. But by then it will be just one more thing.