Salvation Blues Read online

  or the effigies of pigs, his jugs of Pet and Meadow Gold,

  building altars in troughs, raising monuments in the stable

  where Charlie, the elderly gelding, had fallen and was shot.

  And even when my father found them and told him

  and told him, and explained again, he would not stop,

  but continued, more stubbornly then, filling the loft,

  rattling in the crib's musical shucks, so the field mouse

  turned back from the least kernel of the spindliest cob,

  and when the pigeons broke from their nests in the rafters

  with a bilious cooing and a gallows laughter of wings,

  he might have thought he heard the future come suddenly,

  as though the gate above him would open that easily,

  completing the foolishness, and he must have known

  the ancient lie of form, the empty truth of containers.

  WINTER RETREAT: HOMAGE TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  There is a hotel in Baltimore where we came together,

  we black and white educated and educators,

  for a week of conferences, for important counsel

  sanctioned by the DOE and the Carter administration,

  to make certain difficult inquiries, to collate notes

  on the instruction of the disabled, the deprived,

  the poor, who do not score well on entrance tests,

  who, failing school, must go with mop and pail

  skittering across the slick floors of cafeterias,

  or climb dewy girders to balance high above cities,

  or, jobless, line up in the bone cold. We felt

  substantive burdens lighten if we stated it right.

  Very delicately, we spoke in turn. We walked

  together beside the still waters of behaviorism.

  Armed with graphs and charts, with new strategies

  to devise objectives and determine accountability,

  we empathetic black and white shone in seminar rooms.

  We enunciated every word clearly and without accent.

  We moved very carefully in the valley of the shadow

  of the darkest agreement error. We did not digress.

  We ascended the trunk of that loftiest cypress

  of Latin grammar the priests could never

  successfully graft onto the rough green chestnut

  of the English language. We extended ourselves

  with that sinuous motion of the tongue that is half

  pain and almost eloquence. We black and white

  politely reprioritized the parameters of our agenda

  to impact equitably on the Seminole and the Eskimo.

  We praised diversity and involvement, the sacrifices

  of fathers and mothers. We praised the next white

  Gwendolyn Brooks and the next black Robert Burns.

  We deep made friends. In that hotel we glistened

  over the pommes au gratin and the poitrine de veau.

  The morsels of lamb flamed near where we talked.

  The waiters bowed and disappeared among the ferns.

  And there is a bar there, there is a large pool.

  Beyond the tables of the drinkers and raconteurs,

  beyond the hot tub brimming with Lebanese tourists

  and the women in expensive bathing suits doing laps,

  if you dive down four feet, swim out far enough,

  and emerge on the other side, it is sixteen degrees.

  It is sudden and very beautiful and colder

  than thought, though the air frightens you at first,

  not because it is cold, but because it is visible,

  almost palpable, in the fog that rises from difference.

  While I stood there in that cheek-numbing snow,

  all Baltimore was turning blue. And what I remember

  of that week of talks is nothing the record shows,

  but the revelation outside, which was the city

  many came to out of the fields, then the thought

  that we had wanted to make the world kinder,

  but, in speaking proudly, we had failed a vision.

  PUSSY

  Not yet have I seen it published in 18-point bold.

  Neither in the British nor the American anthologies.

  When I say it I feel the soul of fairness and feminism

  About to descend precipitately, lift me by the scruff

  Of the occiput, and drop me like a clam on a rock.

  I feel the preachers and Aunt Pollys of the world

  Approaching with their portable altars and soap.

  Long ago my mother told me write uplifting things.

  But five black boys smuggled it across the bottoms

  From the boodegger's hut and slipped it in my ear—

  Reuben, Clifford, Roman, Joe, and Alphonso Lemon.

  I had no idea, I am very sure, what it could mean.

  I thought the fishy condoms lovers had flung into ditches

  Were the hog bladders my uncles had used for balls,

  Scuffling and roughhousing in the lot behind the barn

  Twenty-five or thirty years before I was born.

  But even then I must have known it was wrong.

  I was pulling a stunted bluegill from a scummy hole

  In that creek everyone in my family likes to mention

  Over and over because it goes by our family name,

  If it goes at all, frothing the ooze of dairy farms.

  Just then the five Lemons came hooting and hollering

  And crowded in around me with their long poles.

  I had not seen them before. I knew who they were.

  Long ago my grandfather's grandfather took the ferry

  Across the Tennessee River and brought back Reba,

  Their grandmother's grandmother. She had been sold

  To a plantation over there for four hundred dollars,

  And he had to jaw two hours and feign lust for another,

  Lighter girl to get her back for four hundred dollars.

  Everyone in my family tells this story over and over

  As though we had all crossed the river Jordan and

  Jehovah himself stood waiting in a white cotton robe.

  That day long ago we boys lifted dozens from the hole,

  Fussing though, for they kept saying it over and over.

  Many times since, privately, I have spoken it in love,

  But not until today have I written it down on paper,

  So I remembered the fish and the history of that woman.

  Even if I have told it badly, being a man. I know

  The scrawniest women were worth more than the strongest men.

  EVERY DAY THERE ARE NEW MEMOS

  Fact-fluffed, appended with dates, they drift down, O bountiful

  accountings, O grim disbursements!

  I take them from the box. I take them from the groggy hand that

  moved for no more purpose

  Than to record the slow minutes of meetings where nothing was

  really resolved,

  But I keep thinking that those names hoisted above small towns

  and splashed

  With orange paint across the silver tanks of water towers

  Mark the final defeat of the block plant and the soybean fields, and

  I keep believing

  That those luminous nicknames, Blade and Superstar, as they surface

  in Queens or the South Bronx—

  Spraypainted so artfully on the sides of subway cars that one

  Has to look two or three times beneath curiosity and admiration to

  make out the lettering—

  Represent our surest victories over glass, concrete, and steel.

  In a time of vague and courteous doubt, in the quantum amnesia, in

  the fretful face

  Of failed loves, I have put my faith in the locally signed work:

  John Payne />
  Hardware, Red Mullins Rebuilt and Guaranteed Transmissions,

  Bob and Stump Stevenson

  Of Stevenson Brothers Furniture. Everywhere else the family business

  is lost. Everywhere else

  The anonymous acme of the great purchase rewards and subsumes all

  minor concerns,

  Subcontracting for its own name a tone: soporific, indigenous to no

  tongue,

  But projecting a gray aura of confidence, of accurate machines.

  That is why I work very hard to make out the name Delray Jenks

  under the Prudential sign.

  I imagine him sneaking out at night in his old shoes to repossess his

  city with paint,

  Writing soliloquies on sidewalks, aphorisms in public restrooms—

  But we do not truly read them, the entries are so profligate they

  seem cracks

  Ramifying up walls, flawing the marble patina of our days.

  Yet in just this dubious way the leopard and the fox express their

  clear boundaries,

  The braggart signals to the saint from across the abyss.

  Whatever was brought low is lifted high. Whatever was nameless shines.

  The insides of buses are like phonebooks listing the fierce and the

  promiscuous,

  And in the woods, the lovers who carve their initials deep

  Into the beeches are like Whitman reviewing his own poetry. Proud flesh,

  Proud glamour of the self, my joy now is to sign this openly, I who

  often wanted to be no one

  And dreaded more than stitches the roll approaching my name.

  CARPE DIEM

  Though pretty, it rarely worked, lining seduction

  with worms or being always right, like some ideal

  marvel of professors, when there was time for music,

  which was never words so much as time. And the subject

  of those songs we prayed all adolescence to become

  was not love, really, but the loneliness love betrays:

  summers immersed in childhood's various waters,

  warm and cool springs weaving the plaid of Brushy Lake,

  and letting it all go, that guilty underwater rush.

  Such easy idylls as the ice cream truck interrupts

  are what we have of abandon, though we would not leave.

  Even while we were there, we were begging to return,

  and some of the bodies springing from bumpered posts

  had already grown breasts, strange hairs at the groin

  like cursive signatures we had once itched to sign.

  To speak of the body is to return to that very place

  where the body was most alive, not to the corpse.

  Those who think of bodies most haven't seen one,

  not yet. While they endure the first hormonal surge,

  their bodies answer even dreams with awkward thrusts

  that seem to catch them in machines and hurt memory.

  And they still harbor toys: stuffed animals forgetting

  their names, incomplete sets, trucks with broken grilles.

  Only their guarded silences seem unseasonably adult,

  though each door stonewalls the moment of flesh

  until the chrysalis breaks and they fall to each other.

  In lachrymose spasms. In ripe seizures of abstract joy.

  Still, I don't remember what hurt me most, the blue

  and womanly corpse or the slim body of my first girl.

  Perhaps because the corpse was family, in my mind

  it seemed to surprise some shameful act of bestial love

  that stuck the eyes on open. As for the girl,

  since she lay in a half-dark back seat and cringed

  a little out of childish modesty, I cannot swear I saw

  the breasts embarking, the slow gift of the thighs,

  but staggered afterward from the car and sat a good

  twenty minutes on a rock, drunk on nothing but sense

  and alien fortune. I saw us married and quarrelsome

  in a trailer beside the silo on her family's dairy farm,

  and then, faintly, the edge of a harder embrace,

  skull against cheek, ribcage against breast. The sky

  wore that raincloud look of a poorly rinsed wound.

  Both times attach me to a third and ring like a chord.

  I grieved them both and loved steadily as I grieved,

  but why do they come together now, corpse and girl?

  —admonishing me, Be quick and gentle as you change

  seat to bed, sheet to shroud, as though I were not

  already all here and late maybe for the time of my life.

  A BLASPHEMY

  A girl attacked me once with a number 2 Eagle pencil

  for a whiny lisping impression of a radio preacher

  she must have loved more than sophistication or peace,

  for she took the pencil in a whitened knuckle

  and drove the point with all her weight behind it

  through a thick pair of jeans, jogging it at the end

  and twisting it so the lead broke off under the skin,

  an act undertaken so suddenly and dramatically

  it was as though I had awakened in a strange hotel

  with sirens going off and half-dressed women rushing

  in every direction with kids tucked under their arms;

  as though the Moslems had retaken Jerusalem for

  the twelfth time, the crusaders were riding south,

  and the Jews in Cádiz and Granada were packing

  their bags, mapping the snowy ghettos of the north.

  But where we were, it was still Tuscaloosa, late

  summer, and the heat in her sparsely decorated room

  we had come to together after work was so miserable

  and intense the wallpaper was crimping at each seam,

  the posters of daisies and horses she had pasted up

  were fallen all over the floor. Whatever I thought

  would happen was not going to happen. Nothing

  was going to happen with any of the three billion women

  of the world forever. The time it would take

  for the first kindness was the wait for a Campbellite

  to accept Darwin and Galileo or for all Arkansas

  to embrace a black Messiah. The time it would take

  for even a hand to shyly, unambiguously brush my own

  was the years Bertrand Russell waited for humanism,

  disarmament, and neutrality. And then she was

  there, her cloth daubing at the darkly jellying wound.

  In contrition, she bowed with tweezers to pick the grit.

  With alcohol, she cleansed the rubbery petals.

  She unspooled the white gauze and spread the balm of mercy.

  Because she loved Christ, she forgave me. And what

  was that all about? I wondered, walking home

  through the familiar streets, the steeple of each church

  raised like a beneficent weapon, the mark of the heretic

  on my thigh, and mockery was still the unforgivable sin.

  PASTORAL FOR DERRIDA

  When coyotes hunt, they come as a clean silence

  comes to a text. They come from beyond myths

  out of the tree line along the creek and pick

  a lamb, a tender and easy word. Spoken once,

  it won't be changed, and the ewe bawls all day.

  All night under flocculent covers, we give her up

  to sleep. The next morning, clear and warm,

  the sun's a word we'd want to mean happiness,

  but the ewe holds her place, perfecting rage,

  and lets the burrs knot her wool, and goes down

  wobbly on scuffed hocks, muddy with grief.

  The cry swells deep in her hot sheep heart

  and floats o
ut to us like pieces of her lamb,

  spleen and scruff, follicles pebbly as toads,

  so we see, not just lamb, but our own kids

  that perishable, that liable to be broken on fangs.

  Like any parent, I'd think too much of peril.

  My worries blur from the herd of likelihood,

  far from the soft, hospitable centers of dens,

  where the lawnmower throws a shrapnel of wire,

  where the deaf missile strays from the silo.

  Still, I wonder who or what she means to call—

  not us, certainly, any more than clouds or trees—

  or if the petition, repeating, means at all,

  or is some hunger that longs beyond capacity

  of stomachs, with no object in grain or grass.

  It could be any thing or one, sheep or man:

  in elms, summer squalls or winter whines;

  the cat howls on the barbed, necessary prick.

  The times I'd cry all day, I finally was the cry

  itself and not myself, but sob on lemony sob

  like wave on wave breaking against a rock,

  autonomous, purer once there were no tears.

  Any cry begins profound, in the ore of words,

  in the lungs' pink lode and honeycomb. It

  thickens like gravity in the unsuckled udder.

  Hear it, and you'd know the theme was loss,

  or how every cry's a compass with no needle

  that offers, anyway, some vague direction,

  as the disbeliever offers up his prayer

  to the crazed heavens, to the absent gods.

  And surely even the ewe must know

  it does no good to cry, to carry this tune

  until it carries her—"to the dogs," we'd say,

  to butcher and marl. Neither does it help

  to ply the tools of facile affection, sweet

  words that would succor, hands that would

  soothe the hives of demonstrative afflictions,

  though these mean well. Poor culpable

  spirit, unreckoning Dostoevski among the beasts—