Salvation Blues Read online

  everything else on the floor—dishes, fishing tackle, wadded sheets of

  typing paper,

  the bedsprings leaning against one wall wired to a black-and-white TV.

  Through the wall I heard arguments, then thuds, something heavy,

  maybe chairs

  being thrown, doors slamming, then the bass throbbing over the weeping.

  That year filth was the ledger I kept, marking each shirt, each towel.

  Now that I'm happy, I need illness or blows before the laundromat

  rises from the ashes

  of my fever and confusion, and I can tell my wife how I looked at this

  one's thighs

  or that one's enormous and floppy breasts as she knelt to take her sad

  underthings

  from the dryer; how much I wanted their vulnerability, their poverty

  and hatred still to be there

  once I was happier; and how much I wanted happiness then, even there,

  smelling the faint and artificial odors of lemon blossoms, searching

  the wire baskets

  for the mates to mismatched socks, the crude angels of

  embarrassment.

  Almost a year and a half of my life has been blocked out, washed

  clean, the disease

  of the self quarantined, checked there, and I don't want to think

  about the laundry spinning in each washer, the dryers stationed like

  robots,

  and the rejected people waiting, as though for a simple resurrection.

  I don't want a new life spun clean of its dirt and chaos. The day my

  wife's mother,

  my wife, and I came down the mountain from Santa Tecla to La

  Libertad,

  I had been waiting for the river that runs through that place, even

  with the war there,

  the way the women, some with their blouses off, were sitting on the rocks

  with baskets of laundry to be knuckled and scrubbed, the children

  splashing in and out of the shallow green pools left in the dry season,

  and stretched beside them the shirts for labor and the shirts for

  dancing, the shirts for God

  and the shirts for dying, all were whitening, were slowly drying

  around their stains,

  and the laughter and the Spanish came up to me through the almond

  trees,

  purely and without reason, rising on the small wind like birds.

  THE MOSQUITO

  I see the mosquito kneeling on the soft underside of my arm,

  kneeling

  Like a fruitpicker, kneeling like an old woman

  With the proboscis of her prayer buried in the idea of God,

  And I know we shall not speak with the aliens

  And that peace will not happen in my life,

  not unless

  It is in the burnt oil spreading across the surfaces of ponds,

  in the dark

  Egg rafts clotting and the wiggletails expiring like batteries.

  Bring a little alcohol and a little balm

  For these poppies planted by the Queen of Neptune.

  In her photographs she is bearded and spurred, embellished

  five hundred times,

  Her modular legs crouching, her insufferable head unlocking

  To lower the razor-edge of its tubes, and she is there

  in the afternoon

  When the wind gives up the spirit of cleanliness

  And there rises from the sound the brackish oyster and squid

  smell of creation.

  I lie down in the sleeping bag sodden with rain.

  Nights with her, I am loved for myself, for the succulent

  Flange of my upper lip, the twin bellies of my eyelids.

  She adores the easy, the soft. She picks the tenderest blossoms

  of insomnia.

  Mornings while the jackhammer rips the pavement outside my

  window,

  While the sanitation workers bang the cans against the big truck

  and shout to each other over the motor,

  I watch her strut like an udder with my blood,

  Imagining the luminous pick descending into Trotsky's skull

  and the eleven days

  I waited for the cold chill, nightmare, and nightsweat of malaria;

  Imagining the mating call in the vibrations of her wings,

  And imagining, in the simple knot of her ganglia,

  How she thrills to my life, how she sings for the harvest.

  FOR THE EATING OF SWINE

  I have learned sloppiness from an old sow

  wallowing her ennui in the stinking lot,

  a slow vessel filled with a thousand candles,

  her whiskers matted with creek mud,

  her body helpless to sweat the dull spirit.

  I have wrestled the hindquarters of a young boar

  while my father clipped each testicle

  with a sharpened barlow knife, returning him,

  good fish, to his watery, changed life.

  And I have learned pleasure from a gilt

  as she lay on her back, offering her soft belly

  like a dog, the loose bowel of her throat

  opening to warble the consonants of her joy.

  I have learned lassitude, pride, stubbornness,

  and greed from my many neighbors, the pigs.

  I have gone with low head and slanted blue eyes

  through the filthy streets, wary of the blade,

  my whole life, a toilet or kitchen,

  the rotting rinds, the wreaths of flies.

  For the chicken, the cow, forgetfulness. Mindlessness

  blesses their meat. Only the pigs are holy,

  the rings in their snouts, their fierce, motherly indignation,

  and their need always to fill themselves.

  I remember a photograph. A sheriff had demolished

  a still, spilling a hundred gallons of moonshine.

  Nine pigs passed out in the shade of a mulberry tree.

  We know pigs will accommodate

  demons, run into rivers, drowning of madness.

  They will devour drunks who fall in their ways.

  Like Christ, they will befriend their destroyers.

  In the middle of winter I have cupped my hands

  and held the large and pliable brain of a pig.

  As the fires were heating the black kettles,

  I have scrupulously placed my rifle between pigs' eyes

  and with one clean shot loosened the slabs

  of side-meat, the sausages that begin

  with the last spasms of the trotters.

  O dolphins of the barnyard, frolickers

  in the gray and eternal muck, in all your parts

  useful, because I have known you, this is the sage,

  and salt, the sacrificial markers of pepper.

  What pity should I feel, or gratitude, raising you

  on my fork as all the dead shall be risen?

  TWO GIRLS AT THE HARTSELLE, ALABAMA, MUNICIPAL SWIMMING POOL

  Too much of the country in their walk–

  as though each struggled

  against a tree at the center of her body,

  or their bare feet were shoes

  that didn't fit, poverty in every step,

  in every move, deliberate

  as footsteps in plowed fields,

  through clots of local boys, up

  slippery rungs to the high board,

  their bodies oiled, flipping away

  casually the menthol cigarettes,

  tossing back their bleached hair,

  both twelve or thirteen years old:

  like old houses, like mothers

  pitched forward into the wind,

  entering the cold, strange waters.

  DECADENCE

  1

  In the junque store the idlers were talking about p
rimitives,

  how scarred wood can be steeped in dignity, how that subtle

  patina

  derives from hands, hands of the old, hands of the poor.

  The hands of the dealer

  were on the halltree, the cream separator, the set of burled,

  chestnut tools, as he whispered, Williamsburg, Jamestown,

  Monticello.

  He was selling an incarnation of this country, not mere

  furniture,

  patched and splaying relics, like that pie safe, still hopeful

  in its ugliness,

  hewn crudely with a broadax, planed with bad iron for

  temporary uses.

  I could remember how, in my grandmother's attic, dirt daubers

  would construct their nests along the pegs

  of an unworkable loom, and how one residential cell at a time

  would crumble,

  dusting the human heirlooms stacked in boxes underneath:

  delicate Japanese fans, mother-of-pearl combs, letters

  from flung hamlets named for springs, groves, and crossroads.

  Under the spectacles that I had found in a stray boot

  a bleached calligraphy

  yielded its covered-dish suppers, its gaggle of Sunday

  visitations,

  while time's odor, dull and implacable,

  stirred from a sidesaddle hooked on a rafter–

  redolence of an old horse as he is being led from his last

  pasture.

  Later, when the house was sold, the decadence broke out:

  moths flopped sleepily from giant black trunks,

  and spiders, those shrewd solicitors of corners, invaded

  with light that leaked through shingle cracks,

  gnawing the tablecloths, flawing the spokes of spinning wheels.

  In the junque store

  I could imagine the rage and falling away, the ordeal

  of finishing and refinishing, the worship of smooth surfaces,

  and the patient preservation of flaws. I could love things

  for hands that touched them, before grace, setting the plain

  tables.

  2

  In America there are many sacred places: improbable shrines,

  Jerusalems of bed sheets,

  dim synagogues where the spirit loiters, or sleeps, obsolescent

  as that brakeman

  I saw long ago on the L & N, waving his handkerchief from a

  caboose.

  And here on my front porch, midnight, in Jefferson's paved

  Virginia,

  all the good students are smoking dope and talking about God.

  I watch them hesitate and plunge into history. They pass

  the joint and I hear, in each voice, the blurred, icy dithyrambs

  of Morpheus.

  In each face I watch the moon that rises out of childhood,

  largest light

  against these small heavens resonating through

  the wishful dark.

  Here are our cosmic rose, our jockey of telepathy, our shaman

  of the dime-store mantra.

  The joint shrinks, passing from one to another, O orbital

  communion.

  When the spirit moves you, don't be ascared, spake!

  Summer revival, 1958, Church of God,

  I was watching, Mrs. Morgan

  was coming up like something partially

  digested,

  Mrs. Morgan was home from the nuthouse and she was

  coming

  out of her pew like hot shrapnel of bad corn blasting the

  throat:

  O Savior ... hare me, Lord!

  I have in me the creak of the wheelchair

  after the unsuccessful

  laying on of hands,

  the horror and beauty of it. I have belief rotting and going

  bad in the stomach, old egg taste that comes to me like

  postcards

  from places I'd rather forget. On the porch at midnight

  the students

  will grow silent. They will listen for the wind, the sweet

  summer evening,

  a few stars diminishing slowly, darkening like the notes of a

  lullaby.

  Once everyone was a Hemingway at the party where the girl

  who painted penises stepped out of her clothes. Her pathetic

  gosling neck of a body

  clovered with goose bumps, and Christ! the luminous bad taste

  of her art. I mean

  banana penises rising from baskets of assorted fruits,

  wienerwurst penises curled

  in Dutch ovens, senile penises slumped in waterlogged dories,

  symbolic dorks and phalluses

  of men we knew. I mean the night she painted

  her whole body purple

  and crawled into a party

  dragging two bowling balls, bobbing a prick-head of papier-mâché.

  Now she teaches at the Y,

  drives back and forth from the suburbs in the old

  station wagon.

  I love her, but it is not the same between us, her thighs

  like ponds silting

  from underneath and glazing over, blue-green with varicose

  algae.

  O aging mermaid of the suburbs, I shall teach you Prufrock

  in Continuing Ed,

  and I promise not to embarrass you, to touch you lightly

  as the monarch comes to the leaf of the black locust

  or the wand of the Channel 4 weatherman touches a distant

  storm.

  These nights I think you sleep as the wilderness sleeps beyond

  your windows,

  anaesthetized,

  while the city's nimbus dilates, strewing light

  by the ruined creeks.

  See how the stag

  deer leaps and hesitates and is frozen in the headlights,

  the muskrat tunnels into a covert,

  the rabbit works a pink sock into her nest of lespedeza and

  sedge.

  No wonder the undertaker plays the harmonica! No wonder

  there are psychiatrists everywhere ashamed of their singing!

  No wonder it is always Wednesday.

  4

  Old hands crusted over with eczema, otherworldly, cold

  and blunt as potatoes

  on the back of the pew Wednesday nights, where we would go

  to pray,

  and all the widows were hungry for God, like debutantes

  at the end of a boyless summer,

  or nun-poets of the Dark Ages singing the sensual body of the

  church.

  My grandmother, Mrs. Lyle, Mrs. Patterson, Viola Wilkins,

  Mavis Kent,

  and a few others who could still pray, weep, and sing

  unabashedly,

  each went down. Each languished in Bobby Summerford's

  rest home

  in the perversity

  of extravagant leisure—game hour, story hour.

  Near their deaths

  not one of them believed

  any man had walked on the moon. I am not concerned that

  they rot

  sealed away from us, distant as the death of grocery chickens.

  On the news there is a fly-bait hand extending

  from the rubble.

  I know, a man's hand,

  hand of a believer in Allah. Some nights I dream that I am

  lost,

  wandering among numberless houses, dangling like a root in a

  sewer.

  One of my hands is rotting; I keep it in my shirt like

  Napoleon's hand.

  This is that season, decadence in the leaf we look at. We sing

  for the safe eggs,

  sing with the iced fish in the Piggly Wiggly, the worms, the

  pale grass,

  and the moon seems, yes, to sing, and the water si
ngs in the

  spigot.

  The old furniture sings mildew and mold, and I am happy

  with my friends who remember a few jokes and are serious

  at other times,

  and with my friends who are at once joking and serious,

  and with the most serious jokes, the music of Mozart and

  Brahms.

  5

  I think of the mayfly, who in adulthood forms perfect genitalia

  but no stomach,

  who lives for a single day to fly up and lay her eggs in the

  branches

  From Transparent Gestures (1989)

  TRANSPARENT GESTURES

  There is in the human voice

  A quavery vowel sometimes,

  More animal than meaning,

  More mineral than gentle,

  A slight nuance by which my

  Mother would recognize lies,

  Detect scorn or envy, sober

  Things words would not admit,

  Though it's true the best liars

  Must never know they lie.

  They move among goodbyes

  Worded like congratulations

  We listen for and hear until

  Some misery draws us back

  To what it really was they

  Obviously meant not to say.

  And misery often draws us

  Out to meadows or trees,

  That speechless life where

  Everything inhuman is true.

  Mother spoke for tentative

  People, illiterate, unsure.

  To think of it her way is to

  Reduce all words to tones

  The wind might make anytime

  With a few dead leaves. Our

  Own names called in the dark

  Or quail rising. Sounds that

  Go straight from the ear to

  The heart. There all the time,

  They are a surface too clear

  To see. Written down, no

  Matter how right, they are too

  Slow and vain as those soft

  Vows we spoke in childhood to

  Wild things, birds or rabbits

  We meant to charm. When

  Mother mentioned oaks,

  They could be cut down, sawn

  Into boards and nailed together