Salvation Blues Page 6

  dark glasses,

  In bikinis strung a season away, in greed's modest future.

  On Friday night you would think the world empties there and

  tumbles in a bee-mill

  Of inverted weariness and lust, though it is possible, just past the

  Vision Center,

  To look straight ahead and greet no one, to move quietly.

  And if you stopped as I stopped outside the tuxedo rental, in that space

  That is always empty, in that place that is not a place, but domed,

  vaulted, and fountained,

  If you walked there, with death still fresh in your thoughts

  As a bone needle driven under one nail from the ashes,

  And smelled the sweat of the cloggers and the Elvis imitators,

  And felt the live swamp dried and buckled beneath you,

  And hesitated by Sears and Foot Locker and Pier I,

  You would want all grief to end there.

  You would remember the fraud of the château and the lie of the

  cathedral.

  You would want great shoes to replace the eyes and beard.

  You would want the clove cigarettes and wicker elephants to restore

  the fingers.

  You would want a linen suit to stand for the legs and arms.

  You would have that mutable god, that prayer to things,

  And that religion, whose prophets are actors and salesmen, whose

  scripture is television,

  Whose temples bulge with icons disposable as sacrifice.

  There was a cardboard woman outside the jewelry store.

  Where there had been pain, there was a Japanese car.

  Where there was a voice, whole orchestras were shrunken onto disks.

  This was where the corridor lapsed down the long banister.

  This is what I came to shining in the depths.

  That mirror-shard, that glittering grist at the heart.

  And then the lot, identical forgetfulness and distraction,

  The gray sins, the white depressions and red divorces parked side

  by side,

  The rusty gains, the late-model losses, everything waiting to move us

  again,

  To ease us back into the traffic with our gifts.

  CONTEMPT

  "Lizards," he'd say, dispensing with local men, and then resheath his

  pen and huff back to his drafting table,

  A fiber board pristined with vinyl and overhung with the ambiguous,

  linked appendages of maybe a dozen modular lights,

  One of which, now, by some unconscionable kink of logic, he'd bring

  screeching down above

  His latest renderings of nun-like, mestiza hens I'd named like

  missiles: the Star 5000, the T-100 Egg Machine.

  Those days of fruitless scratching on a pad, those nights of Klee and

  Rilke, and what abortifacient labor

  Leaves, instead of money, that sense of energy troweled out and

  slapped up, no more than a phrase or two

  That sticks, a sketch, no novel, no painting, only time whining

  irrevocably and the feeling

  Of events put off or missed: openings, autograph parties—what else?

  The grudging knowledge that, even in this, we were lucky: recession

  was on; Vietnam still shipped its dead.

  I had the job because a friend knew a friend; he was someone's son:

  a cardiologist or an architect—I never learned.

  Except for the boss, Devon, a transplanted Englishman with waxed

  mustache who chain-smoked Virginia Slims and despised

  Americans,

  And Gwendolyn, his Phi Beta Kappa secretary, we worked alone in a

  kind of paneled coop they'd rigged

  Above a shop that printed invitations and sold used office machines,

  or we'd go out as a team—

  Cullman, Springdale, Gainesville—on this particular morning on a

  road just dusted with the season's first snow,

  Stravinsky on the stereo, the piny Georgia hills, our usual patter, high

  culture, high art,

  And then the building, massive, white, impregnable, our destination

  then, where we'd come to make something,

  One of those brochures or tracts that aspire, through much lyrical glut

  and bedazzlement of facts,

  To be taken as an article, objective, empirical: four thousand bons mots

  of cant replete with scale drawings

  And headed "The World's First Totally Integrated Poultry Processing

  Plant." Was that art? Is this?

  Embellished in four colors, translated into Dutch, Spanish, and

  Portuguese? That moment when he said it, "Lizards"?

  Or later, when the door opened and the stench of bowels, lungs, and

  hearts welled up to us from the line

  That we could just now make out through the steam, that first

  denuded glimpse of carcasses shedding slaughter

  And strung by the talons as they moved through the faceless maze of

  women as in some gothic laundry

  Fellini might have dredged up for the illuminati in heartfelt homage

  to the enduring spirit of Soutine.

  Just that moment then, before a big man, someone officious, a plant

  manager or engineer, herded us in,

  A handshake, a nod, and saying, "Here, take these," he gave us each a

  bag marked "Sanitation Suit,"

  The silly bag-boy hats, the paper coats, and thin latex gloves that now

  we had to haul on as he led us

  Through the machines—the stunner, the killer, the plucker, the

  eviscerator, the de-lunger, the stripper, the chiller—

  Each with its grisly attendant—those women, those Picassoesque

  smocks bespattered with yellow and red,

  That proletarian chorus line, winking, emoting cool or hard-to-get,

  pregnant high school dropouts,

  Tattooed grandmothers, chubby peroxide blondes wagging their

  fannies for the wheels.

  So I knew, before the word had formed in the brain, before my friend

  had covered his lips with one hand,

  And said it in that whisper that frames the sneer and gives it a secret

  eloquence, that it was coming,

  Like one drop melting from a high icicle, falling, and spitting against

  a rock, "Lizards"—

  And then, though how could any have heard, those women, as though

  in antiphony—what is the word?—words?—

  "Sang," "jeered," "hooted," "whistled," "booed," "crowed," "honked,"

  "squawked"?

  If you have ever heard five hundred North Georgia women in full-

  throated glory, parodying the morning cacophony of a barnyard

  And knew that sound was meant for you, you would know how God

  sometimes

  Will call a brother out of the terrible fields, and why the rest of that

  day stands out on the map of days,

  Even the chicken teriyaki they served at lunch, and the ride back,

  snow skunking the ridges—our big idea

  To name one bird and follow it from the chicken house through the

  plant, but gently, describing the genius

  Of each machine, and on to the grocery store, where, yes, that was it,

  a young housewife, no, a widow would pick it up,

  Bells would ring, a handsome man, the president of the company,

  we'd say, would step out from behind the frozen dinners,

  And present a check, ten thousand dollars, and then—dissolve to

  dinner—aw idea of tenderness, we'd call it,

  But would it fly? Each day, I'd write, he'd draw. "Lizards," he'd say by

  way of g
reeting and goodbye.

  Each night at the strip bar in the shopping center, we'd drink on it.

  "Rilke is greater than Keats."

  "Warhol follows naturally from Mondrian, but what I'm after in my

  work—call it Caravaggio with a gun—

  Is riskier, everything exposed between the observation and display";

  then, "Imagine what it means,

  Living in a place like this, loving men—Men?—Reptiles, lizards,

  slopes!"—

  We'd see them crawling from the bathroom to the stools, and then the

  women would mount them,

  Shut their eyes, and grind down hard in that mockery of a dance they

  do that seems at first

  A quote of love's best motions, then just work, then the promise

  withdrawn, gone, the money and the girl—

  Some guys would shrug and grin; others bluster up, throats

  tightening, fists purpling above the watered gin,

  Before the rage guttered in an epithet or joke they'd still be slurring

  as they stumbled out into the cold.

  Some nights we'd stay until the place grew quiet, late, and later,

  a fierce clinking of bottles; now light

  Above the steel mills; now voices: dogs, birds. What would become

  of us?

  SHAME THE MONSTERS

  It is good, after all, to pause and lick one's genitalia,

  To hunch one's shoulders and gag, regurgitating lunch,

  To mark one's curb and grass, to bay when the future beckons from

  the nose,

  Not to exhaust so much of the present staring into the flat face of a

  machine,

  Not to spend so much of the logic and the voice articulating a

  complex whimper of submission,

  But to run with a full stomach under the sun, to play in the simple

  water and to wallow oneself dry in the leaves,

  To take the teeth in the neck, if it comes to that,

  If it comes to little and lean and silent, to take the position of the

  stone, even to hide under the stone,

  But not to ride up the spine of the building with the acid scalding the gut,

  Not to sit at a long table, wondering

  How not to howl when the tall one again personifies the organization,

  Speaking of the customs in remote precincts and the manufacture of

  weapons there,

  Or the near Edens where the pitted balls fly over the tonsured lawns.

  Dear mammals, help me, the argument with flesh is too fierce if it

  outrides time

  And shocks numb the stubborn, beautiful muscles of the heart.

  See, in the memorial gardens, how even the cry struggles in its trap

  under that black hat like a flower.

  In the long rows of tombstones, the ones who were eaten betray

  nothing of the fear that brought them.

  And it was their silence that marked them, day after oathless day, until

  they were covered by the silent lawns.

  Better to take the mud in the hands and holler for no reason,

  to praise the strange

  Alchemy of mud and rain: there is sex; there is food.

  It is good to say anything in the spirit of hair and breasts and warm blood,

  And not to deny the private knowledge, not to wonder how not to

  speak of death,

  And not to deny the knowledge of death, not to invent the silence,

  Not to wonder how not to say the words of love.

  AT SUMMERFORD'S NURSING HOME

  Like plants in pots, they sit along the wall,

  Breached at odd angles, wheelchairs locked,

  Or drift in tortoise-calm ahead of doting sons:

  Some are still continent and wink at others

  Who seem to float in and out of being here,

  And one has balked beside the check-in desk—

  A jaunty shred of carrot glowing on one lip,

  He fumbles a scared hug from each little girl

  Among the carolers from the Methodist church

  Until two nurses shush him and move him on.

  There is a snatch of sermon from the lounge,

  And then my fourth-grade teacher washes up,

  And someone else—who is it?—nodding the pale

  Varicose bloom of his skull: the bald postman,

  The butcher from our single grocery store?

  Or is that me, graft on another forty years?

  Will I become that lump, attached to tubes

  That pump in mush and drain the family money?

  Or will I be the one who stops it with a gun,

  Or, more insensibly, with pills and alcohol?

  And would it be so wrong to liberate this one

  Who stretches toward me from his bed and moans

  Above the constant chlorine of cleaning up

  When from farther down the hall I hear the first

  Transmogrifying groans: the bestial O and O

  Repeating like a mantra that travels long

  Roads of nerves to move a sound that comes

  And comes but won't come finally up to words,

  Not the oldest ones that made the stories go,

  Not even love, or help, or hurt, but goodbye

  And hello, grandfather, the rest of your life

  Coiled around you like a rope, while one by

  One, we strange relatives lean to be recognized.

  MOMENT OF WHITMAN

  Coming down Sand Mountain, many things moved with me in the

  car, cosmic aphasia after a spat,

  A staticky Jonathan Winters tape, The Best of the Rolling Stones,

  And then I saw them, hatless, ungoverned, decamping from the

  church, a thread that flared to rope

  And sprawled across the parking lot and knotted under trees: the bald

  and freshly permed,

  Many with dark coats and red ties or matching purses and shoes,

  Innocuous farmers with their retinues of fledgling weightlifters,

  maiden aunts of philosophy students,

  Ex-coaches of insurance salesmen and guidance counselors,

  Architects plotting the aesthetics of Alabama savings & loans, great

  flocculent femme fatales

  Trailing the mountainous sexual wonder of sixteen-year-old boys.

  Walt Whitman, snow-jobber and cataloguer of American dreams,

  demographer of miracles,

  There was just that instant there, I boiled them in one glimpse and

  thought they'd maybe caucused

  For a wedding or a death, or did they love the Lord so much they'd come

  On Sunday, Wednesday, and now again on Friday afternoon? And

  some of these, too,

  I guessed, had formed the mob I'd seen Saturday two weeks before

  that looked so magisterial, stentorian, Greek,

  As it uncoiled in a stark festoon of white sheets and dunces' peaks

  toward some vitriolic

  Welder's speech against Earl Warren, Satan, the communists, the

  niggers, and the Jews:

  Distinguish them singly or mark them in the curve where they began

  to blur

  And fade along the piedmont of fescue, Anguses, and machines.

  Were these the faces you cheered westward, and numinous bodies, yet

  unpublished in the secret pages of the grass,

  Or does the flying vision always fracture on closer inspection of a part?

  Another mile of farms, the mountains sank to hills, a sorghum mill, a

  spotted mule

  And then, emblazoned on a barn, a painting of a waterfall where,

  later, I would stop

  And grip the rail and watch the violent, white, transfiguring stalk of water

  That seemed to rear as it drove down and
shattered on the rocks and

  clarified beyond

  In many little streams that muddled on and vanished in the trees in

  just that way,

  I thought, that death might settle into things, and still, father of joy

  and understanding, I didn't leap.

  I stood there glowing under the patient faces of the leaves.

  THE PRIVILEGE

  That I took the kickoff, feinted, spun twice, sidestepped a tackle, and,

  glorified,

  Ran fifty-five yards in the open field before the safety sheared me at

  the knees and I rolled

  Down a gully under a barbwire fence and looked up into the sullen,

  algebraic face of a cow;

  But, also, that I came from the dermatologist with my brow parched

  by sunlamps and dry ice

  And walked the logging road up Cooper Mountain and spoke to trees;

  that my mute hysteria

  On bridges, escalators, and telephones ripened gradually into fear;

  that age did not dignify me;

  Also, that I risked my fourth year meditating and erecting cities under

  the old house

  And stayed there with the rotting wine cask and the brown bottles

  until my head

  Bumped against the floor joists and the bus shunted me off to school;

  not just that my long immersion

  In ink filled me with visions of invisibility and supernatural powers;

  Not just that I addled years, dividing and subtracting, spelling the

  words I already knew;

  But, also, that the shy philosopher I plucked from a party in Tuscaloosa

  and squired to New Orleans

  Broke down in Pat O'Brien's and I waited for her in the bleached hall