After the Super Derecho, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 2012
On the third night of the power outage,
we sat in the living room after dinner
trying to believe, as daylight faded,
that the curtains were swaying not because
someone knocked them stretching,
or reaching to the table for more wine,
but because of an actual breeze
traveling on some repentant front
from high up in the Blue Ridge, where it was cold—
an efficient breeze that maybe still contained
enough coolness to lower the heat
by the few degrees that would let us trade
our oven-like insomnia for sleep.
Then I remembered the election game
Amanda taught me: “Apples or Waffles,”
where everyone votes to save just one,
banishing the other option to oblivion.
Majority ruled. By clockwards turns, we’d
nominate contenders. In the first round, apples
beat waffles, 8 to 3. At apples v. peppercorns,
apples won again—7 to 4. By round five, cats
arrived, and would not be toppled, though the vote
was always close—we lost cars, then planes.
But the moon tipped the scales, and Aaron
nearly left the room, as the reigning moon
spread its ghost light, exposing otherworldly shadows
in a dark and darkening caterwaulessness.
Then clothes (why did we cling to clothes?)
beat out the moon, and electricity
(since we’d been living without it for days),
and then clothes fell to music (as they will),
and so did sex, which stunned the minority.
And then came trees. The trees. Three days before,
the lights went out on us at open studios—
we’d blamed the artists’ digital displays. But then
we heard trees snap in half, and saw by flashlight
at the open door, far away, limbs falling
fast as leaves, bowing ballerina-like over the yard,
crossing the exits with a hero-pyre of saplings.
A rainless hurricane—it arrived without a warning.
All over the property, huge trees blocked the paths—
green walnuts blackening like hell-coins on the ground,
the cedar’s ripped pink pith exposed and alien in the sun.
For two days, Aaron cleared debris out of the pool.
In the game, trees outlasted the ocean, and trees
outlasted words (and Janet noticed, every poet
there chose trees). When words were gone,
we ended the game, and someone muttered
“trees or sleep,” and by then the darkness
covered our faces completely, so we couldn’t see
each other clearly, and we walked out of the house
in darkness, under the trees still left, into a world
we were now unsure of, its stillnesses unfixed,
into a world we could not be sure we hadn’t ruined.
Poetry
Operation (I)
Covert, hardly cordial, came commands
from the quarters, hind
and head. Twin branches of the same
government. My mind: heretic, fiend
for fashion, my rhetoric
a couture magazine, all pictorial
content. Back issues abundant, still,
in the pews, the waiting room,
meant for other congregants hell-
bent on staying empty.
In them, as in me, no creed
but beauty, and a brain pretending scorn
for beauty. Chimes of the church I
worshipped: the unholy body, well-read.
No holes to speak of. No heart.
Pepsi
1.
Because she thought even fish said something about class.
Mud-blooded catfish, for example—fried up only by men who
mow lawns and nail shingles and make their living with dirt
hammered under their nails,
but bass, bass were wild, wide-mouth, pink throats caught by men
with enough money for a boat, their heads taken off by the working man
who works the other men.
And trout? We heard about men who ate a fish called rainbow,
but they were freezing their nuts off up north, hip-deep river water,
reciting poetry, casting houseflies across a stream.
So why would soda be any different? RC was for overall-wearing kids
with runny eyes, a once-a-month Moon-Pie treat after huffing
five miles to the general store.
And Coke? Chugged by the common freckle-face gal across the river
in Indiana—a Hoosier who hived her hair and squeezed into June Cleaver skirts—
Lord, look at her in her Sunday best; she actually thinks she looks good.
Pepsi though? Well, Pepsi was married to Joan Crawford,
Pepsi was a bitch who knew how to ash with two taps from a two-inch filter,
not one nicotine stain on her manicured hands.
Pepsi knew how to walk in Italian leather, how to pin a hair piece
at her crown and let it waterfall into an aerosol nest of
natural, how to glue a strip of lashes to her wink.
Pepsi was a short, zippy drink, and chilled just right, it made a place
for herself in this world, knowing just how easy it is to get a man
and just how hard he was to keep.
2.
Because the sound of the first can
in the morning was the sound of nectar
firecracked,
a sugar sent up
to the sky, a dull liquid
kissed with foam, the sound of ready oil
excited by flour, your gravy being made.
Because in a sweating glass,
it cooled
her knot of hot sleep
to the same crisp
as the air-conditioned room.
Because it was the secret
of lemon and orange and vanillin
tickling the air, a fizz that
whispered,
wake up now, Fanny,
your bad flashing night is through.
3.
Because she was loyal—downright militant—to things she loved, Pepsi was all
she would drink. Rarely water, not juice, not milk, and damn straight, no trailer-trash
beer. She might have coffee later, before her shows came on, but this was the drink
that woke her, the drink that kept her up.
Should you fix her a glass, you might get the full Pepsi Lecture, her obsessive
counting game, because there was a hell of a lot she couldn’t control, but she could
control this:
Make it four pieces of ice—not three, and not five. But four. And I don’t want it too full;
don’t make me spill it all over myself. And use a six-ounce glass, not some big suck-o jug,
not a little old juice glass, but six ounces, that big. I want that glass to be plastic and pretty,
something with flowers, maybe in pink, but don’t give me no ugly cup. And it better be clean too; don’t give me no dirty glass, pull it hot from the washer if you have to, but just four—
count them, four—cubes of ice.
4.
Because in the hospital
we lost her
in the deep folds
of a coma
for days,
and when she finally
woke, she was
confused, looked
around, asked,
What are you all here
staring at me for?
Her oldest answered,
Because,
Mama,
we need you.
Well,
okay then,
she said.
Quit
being so useless,
standing around.
Somebody pour me
a fresh Pepsi?
5.
Because it was not water pulled from the well, water from a place with no pipes,
because it was not water so rich in iron that washing with it was like taking a bucket shower
in blood.
Because it was not a chipped Mason jar filled lukewarm from the tap.
Because it was not milk with a layer of unhomogenized creaming the top,
because it was not tea her mama set out on the porch to brown in the sun.
Because it was not Bowling Green, not western Kentucky, and there’s no need
to ever wait again for the mule pulling the ice man.
No, you have a pocket full of change now, Fanny. It’s 1944 again,
no sense in scuffing your feet, standing outside on the hussy corner of the dime store.
You walk right in, order straight from the fountain if you want.
You’re in Louisville now, you have yourself a man, and you’ll never have to choke down
anything flat again.
Lottie
was the name she called us, and what she meant was clumsy, graceless,
all assholes and elbows tripping up the steps, meaning:
Well, I don’t figure that child’s ever gonna learn to ride that bicycle,
how long she gonna perch stone-still on that thing, propped on the kickstand?
I bet Lottie here is scared she’s bound to bite the dust before she even leaves the drive.
Lottie, meaning, well, Lottie, you done broke your grandmama’s crystal bowl
in a thousand pieces, meaning you ain’t never had a summer in all your life
without scabbed knees, meaning absent-minded, plum-bruised,
the side of my leg catching corners, or meaning, as a book put it,
the absence of pleasure makes one clumsy, or in another text, a person post-
trauma can disassociate, quit paying attention, survive the crash soft-limbed,
like a drunk.
Laaa-Tee, sang two-tone, mountain-style, like a come-and-get-it-supper bell,
at times meaning you did something off-kilter, singed with violence,
like well, Lottie, whatever you did to that boyfriend of yours left dents
in the side of his van, or well, Lottie, I can’t believe you just blew the head clear off
your doll with that firecracker. Because yes, Lottie, you really did it this time, meaning,
at least you didn’t kill nobody.
There was a Lottie once, a real Lottie, way back in the family,
but she was crazy as a loon, spent her whole life at Central State with
her finger up inside her trying to grab men’s things. Lottie the nymphomaniac,
the queen masturbator, the gal that would fuck a snake if it didn’t
have a head on it. Lottie, imagined with wild red hair and mosquito-pocked legs,
the fists of her raw knees peeking out from under her tie-back hospital gown.
Lottie, the only woman who wanted it, who wouldn’t say
I’d rather toothbrush the kitchen floor on my hands and knees, wouldn’t say
I’d just as soon set my hair on fire, wouldn’t whisper
I counted each and every rose on the wallpaper before he was through,
or I’d rather pluck my puss hairs out one-by-one than deal
with him tonight, all said in half-jest, a joke hollered down from their teetering
pedestals, making the men rooster up, all said making one thing clear:
I ain’t no Lottie, ain’t no loosey-goosey hot-pants whore.
But I can’t help but wonder, can’t help but make up something
for our Lottie, something to do with a house on stilts in the holler
and a father who took her right under the floorboards where
her mother stood, but who knows, she could have pulled her budding
breasts out for Captain Kangaroo, she could have smeared herself
with oatmeal and rubbed herself raw on the old tweed couch,
a tarpaper ten-cent trick, for all we know—
which is nothing,
which is Lottie is the name she called us, and if you’re not
a Lottie then you’re hands-and-knees down on the floor, that if
what happened to you
doesn’t make you one way, it will make you
another, that you won’t exist at all
or you’ll be
too much,
you bride, you hole, either tripping up the porch steps
or crawling to hide under them,
hot with a match
catching on the old wood planks.
In Vineland
Nothing sturdy. Windsock beside the pole barn just waiting
for a breeze. Mud daubers whispering below the roof eaves.
The whitewashed, weathered tongue-and-groove boards could give any day.
Chancy just tapping the front door jamb, farmhouse that fragile—
nothing sturdy. Windsock beside the pole barn. Just waiting
for some farmboy to chuck a rock, send it crumbling into
the heaps of deposit bottles, Depression and Wheaton
glass in the cellar. The last Station of the Cross: the dust-
mark from an up-turned horseshoe that once hung on the lintel.
Nothing sturdy. Windsock beside the pole barn. Just waiting.
Still Breathing
Lately, I was afraid of not living
close enough to the seeded
circle of wildflowers,
but now, out the window
I see the verdant, purple
bergamot has jumped
the rock border
nearer the dogwood
where bees mumble
the hummingbird feeder.
Into the red, plastic flower
one bee squeezes, spins sugar
water, its wet, furry body
trembling up to a pocket
of breath, drunk and not knowing
there is no escape from heaven.
Priority Seating for People with Disabilities and Seniors
A list expects you know this: what is separate—item
A, item B, item C—and what implicitly is allowed passage,
but the space surrounding a conjunction slips,
its grey slurry indecisive. And where is my own personal
senior for this bus? On the sign one stick
figure sits in an open circle, all angles,
all bones and acute. The other holds a cane.
In Strunk and White the antecedents for age and ability
are indexed between do not construct awkward adverbs and
do not affect a breezy manner. When the riders
loping between the two quarter-pipe slopes
find air on their compact bicycles
with wide rough tires and shiny rims
where brakes should have been, I keep expecting
them to fall—and they do—
but so gracefully with a flip and a lip trick
with only empty space to draw
rubber to concrete, though, of course, we know space
is never empty. Even in a vacuum something is held:
anticipation or the speed of light. Though what
it holds holds room for ambiguity,
the preposition our lonely connection
between the laws of lift and syntax,
between our vertigo and the lies of electric
impulses swerving into lines like flight.
You Were Made for This Part
Your only line is, “Oh, God.”
There are no small parts….
Try it.
No, not like that.
Where is Lee Strasberg when we need him?
Deeper, let out all the air. No, ALL
the air and say it before inhaling,
before that one more time
that brings the world back in
and keeps the heart afloat.
Your moment of death
you rehearse 20,000 times a day.
I know the line, but I can’t do it,
yet. My mother, at 91, has about got it nailed.
She only says it when she tells the story
of her father, whom I never knew.
(He died out of this world
about the time I died into it.
We swapped worlds in the 40s.)
To get the voice for your own role,
be him. You are a physician.
You sit with your daughter
on the front porch. Sunday in spring.
She is 11, and your practice is solid. You’re considered
the best diagnostician in central Alabama.
You don’t know how you do it.
In early med school, 1914, the teacher would
present a patient who walked in,
sat in front of the class.
Male, age 55, three children, a plumber.
His hobby is painting. That is all you were told.
From skin, walk, posture, eyes, hair,
you had to guess what’s killing him.
Anyway, it is now 1931.
You are in the swing.
Your daughter’s chattering about the birds
competes with the birds.
The town loves you.
On the sweet-smelling sidewalk,
a pregnant woman walks toward town.
Your daughter stops talking
because you’ve stopped the swing.
She sees your skin has changed,
a harder skin, and your eyes
lose all she ever knew in them. Your voice—
and this is the voice you must feel your way into
for your own part—is a voice
your daughter has never heard.
She will remember this all her life,
but she will not tell it until she is in her 80s.
Then she will tell it often.
“Oh, God,” she hears the stranger beside her say,
“Oh, God. That girl is carrying a dead baby.”
The young girl is not your patient.
But she has guessed.
There’s no stillness in the world like that.
She hasn’t spoken of it yet.
To speak it is to make it real.
She can’t birth the word.
You will learn on rounds later in the week
that you were right. She was right.
She knew, and you knew that she knew.
And you couldn’t stop the saying of it
out of your empty chest,
not even to protect the innocence of your own child,
who worshipped you.
That’s not your role but that’s the line
and that’s the voice you’re working for,
a finality in knowing, and not knowing
how you know.
Of course
like all of us, you will have to practice.
With a lover or lost lover, being struck
dumb by what you’ve become,
seeing a Matisse in the next hall
after a dull room of 18th century
American portraiture, or
waking to a morning after sex
with a fool, or the moment of knowing
your kid is just wonderful in so many ways
you didn’t teach him.
You’ll work on it a lot
every day,
all your days.