Salvation Blues Read online

I would stand, too, and send each

  bleat like a shovel into the flinty air

  under the hermeneutical circle of the vulture.

  LIFE OF SUNDAYS

  Down the street, someone must be praying, and though I don't

  Go there anymore, I want to at times, to hear the diction

  And the tone, though the English pronoun for God is obsolete—

  What goes on is devotion, which wouldn't change if I heard:

  The polished sermon, the upright's arpeggios of vacant notes.

  What else could unite widows, bankers, children, and ghosts?

  And those faces are so good as they tilt their smiles upward

  To the rostrum that represents law, and the minister who

  Represents God beams like the white palm of the good hand

  Of Christ raised behind the baptistry to signal the multitude,

  Which I am not among, though I feel the abundance of calm

  And know the beatitude so well I do not have to imagine it,

  Or the polite old ones who gather after the service to chat,

  Or the ritual linen of Sunday tables that are already set.

  More than any other days, Sundays stand in unvarying rows

  That beg attention: there is that studied verisimilitude

  Of sanctuary, so even mud and bitten weeds look dressed up

  For some eye in the distant past, some remote kingdom

  Where the pastures are crossed by thoroughly symbolic rivers.

  That is why the syntax of prayers is so often reversed,

  Aimed toward the dead who clearly have not gone ahead

  But returned to prior things, a vista of angels and sheep,

  A desert where men in robes and sandals gather by a tree.

  Hushed stores, all day that sense a bell is about to ring—

  I recognized it, waking up, before I weighed the bulk of news

  Or saw Saturday night's cars parked randomly along the curb,

  And though I had no prayer, I wanted to offer something

  Or ask for something, perhaps out of habit, but as the past

  Must always be honored unconsciously, formally, and persists

  On this first and singular day, though I think of it as last.

  From Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems (1993)

  THE WORK OF POETS

  Willie Cooper, what are you doing here, this early in your death?

  To show us what we are, who live by twisting words—

  Heaven is finished. A poet is as anachronistic as a blacksmith.

  You planted a long row and followed it Signed your name X for

  seventy years.

  Poverty is not hell. Fingers cracked by frost

  And lacerated by Johnson grass are not hell.

  Hell is what others think we are.

  You told me once, "Never worry."

  Your share of worry was as small as your share of the profits,

  Mornings-after of lightning and radiator shine,

  The beater Dodge you bought in late October—

  By February, its engine would hang from a rafter like a ham.

  You had a free place to stay, a wife

  Who bore you fourteen children. Nine live still.

  You live in the stripped skeleton of a shovelbill cat.

  Up here in the unforgivable amnesia of libraries,

  Where many poems lie dying of first-person omniscience,

  The footnotes are doing their effete dance, as always.

  But only one of your grandsons will sleep tonight in Kilby Prison.

  The hackberry in the sand field will be there long objectifying.

  Once I was embarrassed to have to read for you

  A letter from Shields, your brother in Detroit,

  A hick-grammared, epic lie of northern women and money.

  All I want is to get one grain of the dust to remember.

  I think it was your advice I followed across the oceans.

  What can I do for you now?

  THE BRIDGE

  These fulsome nouns, these abbreviations of the air,

  Are not real, but two of them may fit a small man

  I knew in high school who, seeing an accident,

  Stopped one day, leapt over a mangled guardrail,

  Took a mother and two children from a flooded creek,

  And lifted them back to the world. In the dark,

  I do not know, there is no saying, but he pulled

  Them each up a tree, which was not the tree of life

  But a stooped Alabama willow, flew three times

  From the edge of that narrow bridge as though

  From the selfless shore of a miracle, and came back

  To the false name of a real man, Arthur Peavahouse.

  He could sink a set shot from thirty feet. One night

  I watched him field a punt and scat behind a wall

  Of blockers like a butterfly hovering an outhouse.

  He did not love the crashing of bodies. He

  Did not know that mother and her three children

  But went down one huge breath to their darkness.

  There is no name for that place, you cannot

  Find them following a white chain of bubbles

  Down the muddy water of these words. But I saw

  Where the rail sheared from the bridge—which is

  Not real since it was replaced by a wider bridge.

  Arthur Peavahouse weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.

  Because he ran well in the broken field, men

  Said he was afraid. I remember him best

  At a laboratory table, holding a test tube

  Up to the fight, arranging equations like facts,

  But the school is air over a parking lot. You

  Are too far from that valley for it to come

  All the way true, although it is not real.

  Not two miles from that bridge, one afternoon

  In March, in 1967, one of my great-uncles,

  Clyde Maples, a farmer and a commissioner of roads,

  And his neighbor, whose name I have forgotten,

  Pulled more than a hundred crappies off three

  Stickups in that creek—though the creek is not

  Real and the valley is a valley of words. You

  Would need Clyde Maples to find Arthur Peavahouse,

  And you would need Clyde Maples' side yard

  Of roadgraders and bulldozers to get even part

  Of Clyde Maples, need him like the crappies

  Needed those stickups in the creek to tell them

  Where they were. Every spring that creek

  Darkens with the runoff of hog lots and barns,

  Spreading sloughs, obscuring sorghum and corn.

  On blind backwater full schoolbuses roll

  Down buried roads. Arthur Peavahouse was smart

  To run from the huge tackles and unthinking

  To throw himself into that roiling water

  And test the reality of his arms and his lungs.

  Many times I have thought everything I have said

  Or thought was a He, moving some blame or credit

  By changing a name, even the color of a lip or bush,

  But whenever I think of the lie that stands for truth,

  I think of Arthur Peavahouse, and not his good name,

  But his deciding, as that car settled to the bottom,

  To break free and five for at least one more moment

  Upward toward light and the country of words

  While the other child, the one he could not save,

  Shrugged behind him in the unbreakable harness.

  GRAND PROJECTION

  Its huge numbers include us, our cars, houses, and substantial goods,

  but the numbers

  Do not stop north of Lake George or south of the Rio Grande.

  There is a large number that stands for the Atlantic.

  There is a very large number tha
t stands for the Pacific.

  Last winter a number of Mexicans smuggling their muscles north in a

  shut railway car

  Suffocated and was added to a larger number, which includes the

  teenage pregnancy and whooping crane,

  And will it be enough, when the great condor and sea tortoise have

  shrunken to one,

  To weigh the hour of ovulation against the bounty of the sperm?

  It is not just the children to come. Also, the rat, the opossum, the

  raccoon, and the mourning dove

  Have traveled the sewer main and, dead, mounted sufficient work

  To be counted among the problems, which include the Mexicans,

  the Ethiopians, and acid rain.

  Our problems are so numerous, it is very essential that we count

  The boats, their size and type, and the number of life preservers, fire

  extinguishers, and horns.

  And it must be clear, even to the forgotten and almost extinct Arapaho,

  Why one of us must keep the books of the crows and the ledgers of

  the bees,

  And, glumly, another counts the instruments after the failed operation

  as the final

  Number is wired to the big toe, and the hands are crossed neatly.

  Otherwise, the dark vector keeps on rising on that unlined graph, and

  we feel,

  From far south, across the plunging of that gulf, in cities uncharmable

  and vast,

  Those streets where a number of the just deceased are left to rot—

  There is no telling when the government trucks will come and pick up

  a token number,

  No reckoning how many each of the deceased has disappointed,

  How many children, crippled, clever, gifted, how many cooperative

  and uncooperative sexual partners.

  The unnumbered fruits rot, unprofitable, shameful;

  The coat of paint is left to peel, no command is given to recover it, and

  there is nothing to say

  After the mortar attack, when the reporters go like maggots, working

  the torn nests.

  Or if there is a story, say it was too much to say even a single palm tree,

  the shade of the mission

  Where the old one-legged man cut tires into sandals,

  Or those bluest of lakes cupped in the craters of dead volcanoes.

  Say there were too many saints and holidays, too many small people

  Following donkeys up roads that vanished into gullies and trees, too

  many siestas.

  Say the mathematicians left, the multiplications were so various, and

  there was nothing left to divide.

  But record these zeros, ripening on vines beyond the infected wells,

  look carefully

  At the mountain devoid of trees, the men passed out on the streets,

  And the women bending to irritate their stony rows of corn, for something

  Like history is trying to take place in secret meetings and bombs,

  Something that does not include us, though we are there in force,

  counting the dead,

  And the aid we read of sending underwrites the new resorts we will

  visit perhaps,

  When the sense of history is strongest, just after the peace is signed.

  ROMANCE OF THE POOR

  The poor people in Springfield go to Dayton to be miserable in style.

  They can hug themselves when they lie side by side on the iron cots.

  They can luxuriate in one red bean held under the tongue.

  For them, a discarded refrigerator crate, tipped on its side and fined

  with plastic bags,

  Is the green shore of an island and a palace's velvet halls.

  Every morning they check out of the Club St. Vincent de Paul,

  And they clump in the warm gusts that scowl up from the sewers.

  They can strip the aluminum from gutters as their mothers harvested

  eggs from boxes of straw.

  Against that snow that is all edge, they can wobble and careen from

  bumper to lightpole,

  Dancing with the parking meter before dying into the hydrant under

  the fire escape.

  Deliriously happy, they lift the sweetest and heaviest wine and sink

  down where the metal is warm,

  Across from the cafeteria and that other richest trough,

  Kingdom of heaven on earth, emerald dumpster of the pizzeria.

  What does it matter if I heap treasure from the stick people, far off

  and helpless, fluttering of brown coats?

  Their lives are not my life. I come as a tourist to their woe.

  But I remember how quickly dark fell, twenty years ago, thumbing

  from Greensboro to Boulder.

  I carried one change of clothes, a notebook, and a little more than

  seven dollars,

  And I thought I could live by the grace of hippies and priests or,

  failing that,

  Prey on park squirrels and the ducks from municipal ponds.

  I did not have to go that way. I could have gone on wrestling those big

  sacks of fertilizer

  From the co-op's storage bins to the beds of pickup trucks,

  Or bludgeoning ice from the front steps of the coliseum,

  But I had to get it straight from the black road and the mouth of the

  blue norther.

  There is a high ledge under every overpass where you can sleep if it is

  not too cold.

  One morning I woke there beside a short man, a carny and ex-con reared

  In the Tennessee Industrial School and a dozen foster homes.

  We talked a stupid dream of burglary. We committed the crime of

  brotherhood.

  Then, hungry and stiff, we trudged up the ramp to a truckstop, where

  he meant

  To convince me to knife a man for three hundred dollars locked in a

  drawer.

  He said we could get away, we could take any one of those semis

  idling outside that place

  Like great buffaloes blowing clouds and clearing their throats.

  But I have taken nothing. I have gotten away clean to Illinois.

  Tonight the steaks frown up at me through the odor of blood,

  And the poor need no help from poems to limp down the alley and up

  into the van.

  They glide to Dayton. They check in to the Club St Vincent de Paul.

  Whatever it is, it is not much that makes a man more than a scrap

  of paper

  Torn out of a notebook and thrown from the window of a bus,

  but it is more than nothing.

  If he holds himself straight up and does not take the life

  Next to his own, give him that much. Leave him to his joy.

  THIRTY-ONE FLAVORS OF HOUSES

  More than once, the brain dies here, dies on the name

  Of a cloud or flower, and the watch is flushed down the toilet;

  Marriages are passed from one to another

  Like buckets of water at an old-time fire.

  And still each spring the premonition bird

  Feathers the same nest in the groin.

  And still the addresses and the phone numbers fly apart.

  The news, with its joyless victims, does not save us.

  Love is all becalmed or starts too fitfully

  As though God and the stupid heart conspired

  To checker each breakfast table with silence,

  And often in the early light it is easy to believe

  That face that shines forever and never ages,

  But the ocean and the trees come to us at night,

  And sometimes we look at each other as the ocean

  And trees are seen from the comfort of a w
indow,

  Behind which all the points have been won or lost

  And history shrugs its indifferent shoulders

  And walks across the carpet from its bath

  Humming the forgetfulness of a popular song,

  A song of victims, a song of late courage

  We meant to honor once with money and applause.

  Oh surely if there were some cause, we would think

  To organize communication, transportation, the shipments

  Of shelter and food, or go there ourselves

  To be martyrs if there were a new Auschwitz to die in.

  AT THE MIRACLE MALL

  Are the replacements in? Dove-colored britches, black shirts,

  harbingers of the look

  That already brushed past me as I entered by the east gate, like a

  noun searching for a verb,

  And walked slowly under the names of unimaginable families, past

  shops where the same immaculate

  Fishnet kept sprawling across driftwood sequined with shells,

  And the mannequins went on working out the problems of the world.

  One of the mannequins had frosted hair and wore braces, another,

  her goldleaf dreadlocks

  Skimming the pages of War and Peace, exotic tableaus of the

  Scandinavian and Japanese,

  Ambassadorial saints of some mythical cultural commonwealth that

  speaks in a British accent

  In the United States and talks, on PBS, compulsively,

  Of the great heroes and heroines of opera and classical music.

  But mainly it's California the windows send, in surfboards and