Poetry

Lottie

21 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

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

21 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

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

21 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

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

21 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

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

21 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

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.