Salvation Blues Page 3

  As rooms, and she was mostly

  Quiet, standing in the kitchen,

  Her pin rolling like law

  Across plains of biscuit dough

  While dark ripened, wind

  Died on the tongue of each leaf.

  The night broke in pieces

  If she cleared her throat.

  ONE OF THE CITIZENS

  What we have here is a mechanic who reads Nietzsche,

  who talks of the English and the French Romantics

  as he grinds the pistons; who takes apart the Christians

  as he plunges the tarred sprockets and gummy bolts

  into the mineral spirits that have numbed his fingers;

  an existentialist who dropped out of school to enlist,

  who lied and said he was eighteen, who gorged himself

  all afternoon with cheese and bologna to make the weight

  and guarded a Korean hill before he roofed houses,

  first in East Texas, then here in North Alabama. Now

  his work is logic and the sure memory of disassembly.

  As he dismantles the engine, he will point out damage

  and use, the bent nuts, the worn shims of uneasy agreement

  He will show you the scar behind each ear where they

  put in the plates. He will tap his head like a kettle

  where the shrapnel hit, and now history leaks from him,

  the slow guile of diplomacy and the gold war makes,

  betrayal at Yalta and the barbed wall circling Berlin.

  As he sharpens the blades, he will whisper of Ruby and Ray.

  As he adjusts the carburetors, he will tell you

  of finer carburetors, invented in Omaha, killed by Detroit,

  of deals that fall like dice in the world's casinos,

  and of the commission in New York that runs everything.

  Despiser of miracles, of engineers, he is as drawn

  by conspiracies as his wife by the gossip of princesses,

  and he longs for the definitive payola of the ultimate fix.

  He will not mention the fiddle, though he played it once

  in a room where farmers spun and curses were flung,

  or the shelter he gouged in the clay under the kitchen.

  He is the one who married early, who marshaled a crew

  of cranky half-criminal boys through the incompletions,

  digging ditches, setting forms for culverts and spillways

  for miles along the right-of-way of the interstate;

  who moved from construction to Goodyear Rubber

  when the roads were finished; who quit each job because

  he could not bear the bosses after he had read Kafka;

  who, in his mid-forties, gave up on Sartre and Camus

  and set up shop in this Quonset hut behind the welder,

  repairing what comes to him, rebuilding the small engines

  of lawnmowers and outboards. And what he likes best

  is to break it all down, to spread it out around him

  like a picnic, and to find not just what's wrong

  but what's wrong and interesting—some absurd vanity,

  or work, that is its own meaning—so when it's together

  again and he's fired it with an easy pull of the cord,

  he will almost hear himself speaking, as the steel

  clicks in the single cylinder, in a language almost

  like German, clean and merciless, beyond good and evil.

  THE SADNESS OF EARLY AFTERNOONS

  Maybe the Sheikh gets to toss his oil wells in the dice,

  But here in the living room it's wan more than warm,

  After coffee and sweet rolls, when the vacuum groans

  Ahead of her like a troll, and life is longer than she

  Thought in high school, and time is the critical dust

  That floats above the stereo before the kids return.

  She buffs her nails or plucks from her domestic well

  A flaccid cup of Metrecal, and irons while the TV unfolds

  An evolving plot that is less like a line than a tree,

  With each pictured life stretching its fabulous branch:

  Blackmail, divorce, passion in caves, prisons, gazebos,

  Dead-ending into the pink bud of each commercial. Soaps

  Are all like this, playing out the reel of eventualities,

  Each unlikely trope securing fate in the continuing

  Episode. The girl who scoured sinks and polished crystal

  In the Emersons' kitchen had money. She slowly sank in.

  She was someone from the past, which will come later.

  But when it comes, the answers only pose more questions.

  Will the chauffeur be sent back to Poland? What object,

  Yet unseen, spread that mortifying shock on Erica's face?

  Was it Chad or Josh?—these names that call to the unborn.

  And there are'séances where poverty speaks to good fortune.

  There are so many deep gazes, cryptic sighs, and far away

  The new actress muttering into the mystery of the telephone;

  So many doctors in trouble for something that is not quite

  Clear, some miswielded scalpel or drunken ambiguous procedure...

  The past is everything, though for now, all that may be seen

  Is a soliloquy, the particulars of which will not be fully

  Comprehended until next week, when Lance returns from Salvador,

  Making Jessica erotically glad, but throwing the whole gilded

  Household of the Kenwoods, those sourpuss Episcopalians,

  A curve of destitution, and then the scene changes: a blond

  Girl we do not know yet is struggling up a seaside hill.

  The sense is incomplete, though we can guess why Ashley,

  Our helpless and innocent Rapunzel, is pawning the rubies.

  And it is like life, where the leading cause of infidelity

  Is amnesia, with every plot carried out and entered into

  The rec room of the veterans' hospital, into the contiguous

  Gravy of days that are plotless for the unemployed,

  The unemployable, when the last food stamps have been

  Thrown into the ante in the impossible bluff on a straight,

  And the ace of obsessions has gone unplayed—except here

  On the box. It is not that we do not know what will happen,

  But how will it happen? What unforeseeable kink

  Will draw the dead back up into the camera's glyptic eye?

  And who will tell Gerard, caught in that far set: that

  Child, the one you thought was yours, was never yours,

  And you yourself are not who you think you are. Already

  Tomorrow's table is being set for another guest, some hot

  Latin fluff or venerable tabloid star to be written in

  As you are written off. And this is what has been held back:

  The prognosis, the story beneath that new bandage and lump,

  Is like the exegesis you were always too ready to accept,

  Not understanding what we ... if only we, out here, could come

  Into the story and tell you ... that night you were run down

  And lay unconscious, the doctor who operated was not drunk,

  But bought off by Kirsten, your own wife, who conspired

  With your unknown brother, the Sheikh. And that procedure

  That would reverse everything, bring you roaring out of

  The wheelchair, has been discovered already, but will be

  Used against you in the end, perhaps because our desire

  Is that you join us here in the suburbs and the projects,

  In Peoria and Schenectady. In the vast harem boredom keeps,

  We are offering you the sinlessness of our own unlived lives.

  ON THE BEARING OF WAITRESSES

  Always I thought they suffered, the way they huffe
d

  through the Benzedrine light of waffle houses,

  hustling trays of omelets, gossiping by the grill,

  or pruning passes like the too prodigal buds of roses,

  and I imagined each come home to a trailer court,

  the yard of bricked-in violets, the younger sister

  pregnant and petulant at her manicure, the mother

  with her white Bible, the father sullen in his corner.

  Wasn't that the code they telegraphed in smirks?

  And wasn't this disgrace, to be public and obliged,

  observed like germs or despots about to be debunked?

  Unlikely brides, aposdes in the gospel of stereotypes,

  their future was out there beyond the parked trucks,

  between the beer joints and the sexless church,

  the images we'd learned from hayseed troubadours—

  perfume, grease, and the rending of polarizing loves.

  But here in the men's place, they preserved a faint

  decorum of women and, when they had shuffled past us,

  settled in that realm where the brain approximates

  names and rounds off the figures under uniforms.

  Not to be honored or despised, but to walk as spies would,

  with almost alien poise in the imperium of our disregard,

  to go on steadily, even on the night of the miscarriage,

  to glide, quick smile, at the periphery of appetite.

  And always I had seen them listening, as time brought

  and sent them, hovering and pivoting as the late

  orders turned strange, blue garden, brown wave. Spit

  in the salad, wet socks wrung into soup, and this happened.

  One Sunday morning in a truckstop in Bristol, Virginia,

  a rouged and pancaked half-Filipino waitress

  with hair dyed the color of puffed wheat and mulberries

  singled me out of the crowd of would-be bikers

  and drunken husbands guzzling coffee to sober up

  in time to cart their disgusted wives and children

  down the long street to the First Methodist Church.

  Because I had a face she trusted, she had me wait

  that last tatter of unlawful night that hung there

  and hung there like some cast-off underthing

  caught on the spikes of a cemetery's wrought-iron fence.

  And what I had waited for was no charm of flesh,

  not the hard seasoning of luck, or work, or desire,

  but all morning, in the sericea by the filthy city lake,

  I suffered her frightened he, how she was wanted

  in Washington by the CIA, in Vegas by the FBI—

  while time shook us like locks that would not break.

  And I did not speak, though she kept pausing to look

  back across one shoulder, as though she were needed

  in the trees, but waxing her slow paragraphs into

  chapters, filling the air with her glamour and her shame.

  THE KITCHEN GODS

  Carnage in the lot: blood freckled the chopping block—

  The hen's death is timeless, frantic.

  Its numbskull lopped, one wing still drags

  The pointless circle of a broken clock,

  But the vein fades in my grandmother's arm on the ax.

  The old ways fade and do not come back

  The sealed aspirin does not remember the willow.

  The supermarket does not remember the barnyard.

  The hounds of memory come leaping and yapping.

  One morning is too large to fit inside the mouth.

  My grandmother's life was a long time

  Toiling between Blake's root-and-lightning

  Yahweh and the girlish Renaissance Christ

  That plugged the flue in her kitchen wall.

  Early her match flamed across the carcass.

  Her hand, fresh from the piano, plunged

  The void bowel and set the breadcrumb heart.

  The stove's eye reddened. The day's great spirit rose

  From pies and casseroles. That was the house—

  Reroofed, retiled, modernized, and rented out,

  It will not glide up and lock among the stars.

  The tenants will not find the pantry fully stocked

  Or the brass boat where she kept the matches dry.

  I find her stone and rue our last useless

  Divisive arguments over the divinity of Christ.

  Only where the religion goes on without a god

  And the sandwich is wolfed down without a blessing,

  I think of us bowing at the table there:

  The grand patriarch of the family holding forth

  In staunch prayer, and the potato pie I worshiped.

  The sweeter the pie, the shorter the prayer.

  MULE

  Here is this horse from a bad family/hating his burden and snaffle,

  not patient

  So much as resigned to his towpath around the sorghum mill, but

  pawing the grist,

  Laying back his missile ears to balk, so the single spoke of his wheel

  freezes, the gears lock.

  Not sad, but stubborn, his temperament is tolerance, though his voice,

  Old door aching on a rusty hinge, blasts the martins from their

  gourds, and he would let

  Nothing go behind him: the speckled hen, the green world his

  blinders magnify.

  With the heel of one ecclesiastical hoof, he would stun goats or gods.

  Half-ass, garrulous priest, his religion's a hybrid appetite that feasts

  on contradictions.

  In him Jefferson dreamed the end of slavery and endless fields, but

  the labor goes on

  In prefabricated barns, by stalled regiments of canopied tractors,

  in offices

  Where the harvest is computed to the least decimal point, to the last

  brown bowl of wheat.

  Not with him, the soil yields and futures swell into the radio.

  His place, finally, is to be loved as a curiosity, as an art almost dead,

  like this sulfurous creek

  Of molasses he brings oozing down from the bundles of cane.

  Sometimes in the library I pause suddenly and think of the mule,

  desiring, perhaps, some lost sweetness,

  Some fitful husk or buttercup that blooms wildly beyond the margins.

  Such a peace comes over the even rows, the bound volumes where

  the unicorn

  Bows his unearthly head, where the horned gods of fecundity rear in

  the pages of the sun.

  All afternoon I will think of the mule's dignity, of his shrunken lot—

  While the statistics slip the tattered net of my attention,

  While the lullabies erect their precise nests in the footnotes.

  I like to think of the silver one of my childhood and the dark red

  one, Red.

  Avuncular, puritanical, he stands on hooves as blue as quarries,

  And I think his is the bray I have held back all of my life, in churches

  Where the offering passed discreetly from one laborer to the next, in

  the factories of sleep,

  Plunging a greased hand into the vat of mineral spirits.

  And I think I have understood nothing better than the mule's cruelty

  and petty meanness:

  How, subjugated, he will honk his incomparable impudence; stop for

  no reason;

  Or, pastured with inferiors, stomp a newborn calf on a whim.

  This is the mule's privilege: not to be governed badly by lashes, nor to

  be turned

  Easily by praise; but, sovereign of his own spirit, to take his own time,

  To meditate in the hardening compost under the rotting collars.

  To sleep in wet straw. To stand for nothing
but himself.

  In August he will stand up to his withers in the reeking pond. In the

  paradise of mules

  He will stand with the old cows, contemplative, but brooding a little

  over the sores in his shoulders,

  Remembering the dull shoes of the cultivator and the jet heads of the

  mowing machine.

  Being impotent and beautiful, he will dream of his useless romances.

  THE FOOLISHNESS

  After his last brindled half-Guernsey had been sold off,

  after the third accident in two months, when we hid

  the keys and jerked the starter from the blue Dodge,

  and long after the first heart attack in the hayfield,

  without mentioning it to anyone, my grandfather began

  collecting plastic milk jugs and storing them in his barn,

  stuffing the gunnysacks, laying whiteness down the aisle

  where the halters hung like dim frames of photographs

  and the hens' speckled scat whirled in cotillions of dust.

  Before that he'd kept an archive of superannuated tools,

  severed belts, odd linkages, screws with stripped threads,

  as though, given time, the swaddling crud would unwind

  from the brittle gears, the transmission frozen in reverse

  would bolt the tractor forward through the unturned fields.

  Or these jugs would hold other than what they'd held:

  honeyed things of the spirit, bleached Saharas of wheat,

  water to stanch fire, or ballast to float us past the flood.

  Not that he ever slowed for fear, nor did he often

  pause, cankering into dream. His wisdom was classical

  and practical: to drive staples cross-grain to hold

  the wire, to keep cows with small heads for easy birthing.

  Sisyphus of farms, he knew the husk that transcends use

  and teetered in a snaggle of plows where the spiders

  were tracking rust onto the seat of the cultivator

  from the upward-turning teeth of the harrow. Ahead,

  morning tore at the fresh webs, the ghosts of picksacks

  swayed in the crooked balance of the broken scale,

  and before dawn roused the engines, he would come in secret,

  with more absence than he could possibly have drunk,

  bringing up from the dump, like a boy's stolen melons