Salvation Blues Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  From The Unborn (1985)

  From Transparent Gestures (1989)

  From Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems (1993)

  From Things That Happen Once (1996)

  From Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999)

  From Kingdom of the Instant (2002)

  New Poems (2005)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First Mariner Books edition 2007

  Copyright © 2006 by Rodney Jones

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections

  from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jones, Rodney, 1950–

  Salvation blues : one hundred poems, 1985–2005 / Rodney Jones.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-62430-0

  ISBN-10: 0-618-62430-9

  I. Title.

  PS3560.O5263S25 2006

  811'.54—dc22 2005010550

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-87226-8 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-618-87226-4 (pbk.)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Lisa Diercks

  Typeset in Clifford Eighteen

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Gloria

  From The Unborn (1985)

  REMEMBERING FIRE

  Almost as though the eggs run and leap back into their shells

  And the shells seal behind them, and the willows call back their

  driftwood,

  And the oceans move predictably into deltas, into the hidden

  oubliettes in the sides of mountains,

  And all the emptied bottles are filled, and, flake by flake, the snow

  rises out of the coal piles,

  And the mothers cry out terribly as the children enter their bodies,

  And the freeway to Birmingham is peeled off the scar tissue of fields,

  The way it occurs to me, the last thing first, never as in life,

  The unexpected rush, but this time I stand on the cold hill and watch

  Fire ripen from the seedbed of ashes, from the maze of tortured glass,

  Molten nails and hinges, the flames lift each plank into place

  And the walls resume their high standing, the many walls, and

  the rafters

  Float upward, the ceiling and roof, smoke ribbons into the wet cushions,

  And my father hurries back through the front door with the box

  Of important papers, carrying as much as he can save,

  All of his deeds and policies, the clock, the few pieces of silver;

  He places me in the shape of my own body in the feather mattress

  And I go down into the soft wings, the mute and impalpable country

  Of sleep, holding all of this back, drifting toward the unborn.

  SWEEP

  The two Garnett brothers who run the Shell station here,

  who are working separately just now,

  one hunched under the rear axle of Skippy Smith's Peterbilt tractor,

  the other humming as he loosens the clamps

  to replace my ruptured heater hoses,

  have aged twenty years since I saw them last

  and want only to talk of high school

  and who has died from each class.

  Seamless gray sky, horns from the four-lane,

  the lot's oil slicks rainbowing and dimpling with rain.

  I have been home for three days, listening to an obituary.

  The names of relatives met once,

  of men from the plant where he works,

  click like distant locks on my father's lips.

  I know that it is death that obsesses him

  more than football or weather

  and that cancer is far too prevalent

  in this green valley of herbicides and chemical factories.

  Now Mike, the younger brother,

  lifts from my engine compartment

  a cluster of ruined hoses,

  twisted and curled together like a nest of blacksnakes,

  and whistles as he forages in the rack

  for more. Slowly, the way things work down here,

  while I wait and the rain plinks on the rims of overturned tires,

  he and my father trade the names of the dead:

  Bill Farrell for Albert Dotson,

  Myles Hammond, the quick tackle of our football team,

  for Don Appleton, the slow, redheaded one.

  By the time the rack is exhausted,

  I'm thinking if I lived here all year I'd buy American,

  I'd drive a truck, and I'm thinking

  of football and my father's and Mike's words

  staking out an absence I know I won't reclaim.

  Because I don't get home much anymore,

  I notice the smallest scintilla of change,

  every burnt-out trailer and newly paved road,

  and the larger, slower change

  that is exponential,

  that strangeness, like the unanticipated face

  of my aunt, shrunken and perversely stylish

  under the turban she wore after chemotherapy.

  But mostly it's the wait, one wait after another,

  and I'm dropping back deep in the secondary

  under the chill and pipe smoke of a canceled October

  while the sweep rolls toward me from the line of scrimmage,

  and Myles Hammond, who will think too slowly

  and turn his air force jet into the Arizona desert,

  and Don Appleton, who will drive out on a country road

  for a shotgun in his mouth, are cut down,

  and I'm shifting on the balls of my feet,

  bobbing and saving one nearly hopeless feint,

  one last plunge for the blockers

  and the ballcarrier who follows the sweep,

  and it comes, and comes on.

  FOR THOSE WHO MISS THE IMPORTANT PARTS

  The year Truman fired MacArthur

  my uncle returned

  from the hospital at Decatur,

  his left hand torn

  from the wrist, milled

  into a ghostly bin

  of Martha White Self-Rising Flour.

  While Oscar Garrett ranted,

  "We ought to get the bastards

  before they get the bomb,"

  and his wife, Mildred, went

  to the kitchen for more custard,

  the blue stump slipped out

  of its flannel sleeve,

  puffy and knuckled

  like the head of a cottonmouth.

  I didn't know pain had a phantom,

  a thorn, like frostbite,

  that ran long and clean

  to the bone of emptiness.

  I don't know yet whether

  the coal stove or shame

  flushed my father's face

  with roses. While important

  history went on elsewhere,

  while the tough March wind

  punched the window frames

  and kicked at the glass bulb

  in the heel of the thermometer,

  my father and uncle were

  almost as old as I am now.

  Now I wish I were Li Po

  with a Yangtze and plum blossom

  to praise, with a poem

  hard as jade to lay

  on the threshold of annihilation.

  If MacArthu
r had marched into China,

  the map would still be yellow,

  or I would not remember

  so much my uncle's good hand

  cold on my brow, and how my eyes

  fell then, out of shyness,

  running along the floorboards,

  passing over his brown shoes,

  over the knots

  with their difficult wings.

  I FIND JOY IN THE CEMETERY TREES

  I find joy in the cemetery trees.

  Their roots are in our hearts.

  In their leaves the soul

  of another century is in ascension.

  I hear the rustling of their branches

  and watch the exhausted laborers

  from the Burgreen Construction Company

  sit down in the shade,

  unwrapping their ham and salami

  and popping open their thermoses.

  Apparently, they too are enamored

  of the hickory and willow

  at the edge of our cemetery.

  They are stretching twine, building a wall

  as though this could be contained.

  Probably they do not think

  of our grandmothers who are pierced,

  and probably they do not want

  to hear about Thomas Hardy,

  who, if I remember, has been dead

  longer than they have been alive,

  and who gave to the leaves of one yew

  the names of his own dead. Anyway

  the only spirits I can call in this place

  are the stench of a possum

  suppurating in secret weeds

  and the flies, who are marvelous

  because their appetite is our revulsion.

  Let the laborers go on. Right now

  I wish I could admire the trees simply

  for their architecture. All winter

  the dying have set their tables

  and now they are almost as black

  as the profound waters off Guam.

  A few minutes ago, when they started

  in a slight breeze off the lake,

  the many and patient sails,

  I could see in those motions

  a little of the world that owns me—

  and that I cannot understand—

  rise in its indifferent passion.

  THOREAU

  It is when I work on the old Volvo,

  lying on my back among the sockets,

  wrenches, nuts, and bolts,

  with the asphalt grinding the skin

  over my shoulderblades, and with the cold grease

  dripping onto my eyeglasses,

  that I think of Thoreau

  on his morning walks around the pond,

  dreaming of self-sufficiency.

  I think of the odometer that shows

  eight circuits of the planet.

  I drop the transmission and loosen

  the bolts around the bellhousing.

  I take it in both hands, jerk,

  and it pops like a sliced melon.

  Carefully, so I won't damage

  the diaphragm, I remove the clutch

  and place it on a clean cloth

  beside the jackstand. I look

  at the illustrations in the manual

  and I think of the lists that Thoreau made.

  By the time I get to the flywheel,

  grease is clotted in my hair,

  my knuckles are raw and bleeding

  against the crankcase, and I am thinking

  of civil disobedience. I am looking

  up into the dark heaven of machinery,

  the constellations of flaking gaskets,

  and I am thinking of Thoreau's dry cow,

  of his cornstalks splintered by hail.

  THE FIRST BIRTH

  I had not seen before how the body opens,

  the petals of liver, each vein a delicate bush,

  and where something clutches its way into the light

  like a mummy tearing and fumbling from his shroud.

  The heifer was too small, too young in the hips,

  short-bodied with outriggers distending her sides,

  and back in the house, in the blue Giants of Science

  still open on my bed, Ptolemy was hurtling toward Einstein.

  Marconi was inventing the wireless without me.

  Leonardo was secretly etching the forbidden anatomy

  of the Dark Ages. I was trying to remember

  Galen, his pen drawing, his inscrutable genius,

  not the milk in the refrigerator, sour with bitterweed.

  It came, cream-capped and hay-flecked, in silver pails.

  At nights we licked onions to sweeten the taste.

  All my life I had been around cows named after friends

  and fated for slaughterhouses. I wanted to bring

  Mendel and Rutherford into that pasture,

  and bulb-headed Hippocrates, who would know what to do.

  The green branch nearby reeked of crawfish.

  The heavy horseflies orbited. A compass, telescope,

  and protractor darted behind my eyes. When the sac

  broke, the water soaked one thigh. The heifer lowed.

  Enrico Fermi, how much time it takes, the spotted legs,

  the wet black head and white blaze. The shoulders

  lodged. The heifer walked with the calf wedged

  in her pelvis, the head swaying behind her like a cut blossom.

  Did I ever go back to science, or eat a hamburger

  without that paralysis, that hour of the stuck calf

  and the unconscionable bawling that must have been a prayer?

  Now that I know a little it helps, except for birth

  or dying, those slow pains, like the rigorous observation

  of Darwin. Anyway, I had to take the thing, any way

  I could, as my hands kept slipping, wherever it was,

  under the chin, by tendony, china-delicate knees,

  my foot against the hindquarters of the muley heifer,

  to bring into this world, black and enormous,

  wobbling to his feet, the dumb bull, Copernicus.

  A HISTORY OF SPEECH

  That night my sophomore date wanted kisses.

  I talked instead of the torn ligaments

  in my ankle, crutches and Ace bandages,

  parading like any arthritic

  the exotic paraphernalia of my suffering

  and, that failing, went further, bobbing

  in the thesaurus of pain: the iron lung,

  the burn, torture with water and bamboo.

  She twisted a frosted curl around one finger.

  It was then she touched the skin along my neck.

  It was then I noticed for the first time

  the strange wing beating in my mouth

  and kissed her in a kind of flight

  that plummeted and searched for branches.

  Ah, but Tahiti of a thousand Tahitis!

  Among the suckling cars of the drive-in,

  trays of pomegranates, lingerie of surf.

  Days I hurled papers onto the porches of invalids.

  June nights I only had to open my mouth,

  out came a flock of multicolored birds,

  birds of all denominations and nationalities,

  birds of nostalgia, the golden birds of Yeats,

  birds trained in the reconnaissance of exclusive buttons.

  Before I knew it I was twenty-two.

  I was whispering into the ear of Mary,

  the mother of Jesus. I was dreaming

  in two languages I did not understand.

  I was sitting in the bar of the Cotton Lounge,

  railing against George Wallace, when the fist

  rang in my stomach and I looked up

  to a truck driver shouting down at me,

  "Talk too much!" Talk too much into greasy

  footprint, linoleum stinking of
beer,

  the thigh of that woman rising to leave.

  Talk too much and understand I'm not to blame

  for this insignificance, this inflation

  in the currency of language. Listen:

  whenever I hurt, the words turned their heads;

  whenever I loved too much, they croaked and hopped away.

  At my luckiest, I'm only saying the grace

  the hungry endure because they're polite.

  Learning speech, Demosthenes put pebbles in his mouth,

  but my voice is haunted by softer things.

  THE LAUNDROMAT AT THE BAY STATION

  When the separation hit me with its tonnage, self-soiling, guilt,

  I used to go there, having no other choice, void of the machinery

  of renewal,

  carrying a pillowcase of spoiled shirts slung over one shoulder, bundling

  in a mildewed towel my knot of blue jeans, underwear, and dirty

  sheets, my legacy, my impossible dowry.

  I think I had never been so lonely, and the girl Shirley, acned,

  leafing through a magazine of teenage stars, who gave change

  in the Kwik-Mart next door when the change machines were broken,

  seemed either

  contemptuous or flirtatious, hot-tempered, feigning an incredible wound.

  I could hear the cycles kick on and off and, underneath, the

  continuous roar

  of water surging up from the valves, and I remember, once I was inside,

  how the dark outside would grow rigid, as though I had entered,

  after all of Oklahoma, the green and narcotic light of a truckstop

  restroom—

  the rubber dispensers on the wall, the mirrors that magnify the pores.

  Most of the customers I don't remember, but I can't forget

  the divorcées in tight black stretch pants, cautiously sorting their lace

  panties, talking too loud

  and pulling their stringy, cotton-headed kids out of the garbage pails,

  whole families, sallow and almost retarded, and improbable younger

  girls,

  big blondes who seemed to leap out of the rain, their hair frosted and

  piled high on their heads,

  their spike heels clicking on the linoleum tiles gummy with diet soda.

  It hurts me, that separateness, and how I lived then, mostly in one

  room, my bed a delirium of books,