Salvation Blues Read online

  of the charity ward

  And watched the red-haired intern cover the dead indigent with a

  sheet and suffered

  His lecture on the epistemological and literary virtues of Ayn Rand;

  that the night

  I lugged her through the foggy streets and left her with the Jesuit

  priest still has some truck with me

  When I strap my son into the car or push him past the gleaming

  lawns; that it stands with the nights

  Of mescaline, the nights of abortions, and the nights of betrayals;

  nothing will shake it

  From the totem of my forty-second year, even if I arrive at clarity, with

  some bitter water for the lilies,

  With some sweet nitrogen for the willows, for that was the privilege,

  to carry the light itself

  And not burn down, not yet, and I will not turn Judas to the madness.

  APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE

  1

  Clearing the boxes, tins of stale biscuits, powdered eggs

  And milk, dried soybeans, we found our last provisions

  Whole except for syringes and numbing drugs

  Imaginative junkies had stripped from the medical kits.

  The water was still pure in each forty-gallon jug,

  The U.S. government cheese barely rinded with mold.

  Two weeks' rations for ten thousand, the foreman said.

  One man hummed. Another told a joke of diddling

  A woman so fat he didn't know if it was out or in,

  Though none brooked the hotter subject underneath:

  The exponential x-ray that would blast all buildings,

  Bridges, and trees, or the fine ash, fallen in dreams,

  The fever and vomiting, the putrefaction of the skin—

  That blind nightmare we fattened for forty years.

  It ran with hell. It ended. It was not the world

  We took on wobbling dollies, up the steep ledge

  Under the bat-fouled bluff, and dumped in the truck,

  But strangely disappointing, then, to see the cave

  Emptied to darkness and know, too, the whole place

  Would go to spiders, the entrance be boarded up,

  Though, later, a local dentist established there

  A five nativity so popular the church put bleachers up,

  And once the fundamentalist governor came and stood

  Before us playing a simple shepherd with a crook,

  Commemorating hope. The mountain overhead, five

  Hundred million tons of limestone, was not enough.

  2

  Too much of the trappings of our imagined ends

  Depends on the hoax and rot of lapsed mythologies,

  Horned broodstock of the dreamlife, ghosts

  Of some earlier holiness, wisdomed up from warnings

  And grafted onto laws already weighted down

  With ancient torts, preferments, property rights—

  But the dream believes most what logic denies:

  Those crusty gods, those fires that gut the heart.

  When I was a boy in Alabama, I loved my mother's

  Biscuits, March rain pelleting on the tin roof,

  My crippled, one-eyed dog; but feared the dark,

  The snaky pond, the neighbor kid who'd come

  On stormy nights and hunker just beyond the porch

  Chronicling missiles and megatons, the joy

  In his voice as he whispered, Vaporized, vaporized,

  And more than him, the six-foot-six evangelist,

  Last night of the revival, Bible wriggling high

  On one blue palm as he rhapsodized on Armageddon.

  I thought, Christ eats the dead. And think now

  How the planet would turn as well without us,

  As when a finger is lifted from a glass

  And the water regains its shape, or sometimes,

  Of a sudden, one night of childhood will clear

  Above the general mist: a rock, a teardrop cedar—

  We stand there linking hands before the fire,

  Sing low, demand to hear the ghost story again,

  Complain incessantly it is too mild unless

  Blood drips from the banister and the headless

  Woman shrieks and writhes up out of the fire.

  We are not thrilled unless we are terrified.

  3

  Only in the tamed trembling of a poem, I had believed

  Some kindness might survive, and "Cool your jets,"

  He told me when I chided him for barging in late

  And slamming down his books as I gravely read

  Gray's "Elegy," a thing I shouldn't remember

  Except it had a point. "Hey man, cool your jets!"

  One of the teenage wisdoms: Beauty is final,

  Devastating, absolute. In ugliness there is hope,

  In trashed rivers, in the slightly obese girl

  Who sat beside me twenty-five years ago as the bus

  Groaned toward evil Tuscaloosa. And so I came

  Like Amos to the black-light, pop-poster salons,

  Read Vonnegut, heard the Dead, dropped mescaline

  In numb, freaked-out America that year of Tet,

  Said, "I won't go. I won't kiss the ass of death"—

  But lacked the ossifying cool, the Stratocaster,

  Ponytail, and rap that arched the backs of girls,

  And so dug the French thing from Michaud to Villon

  And languished in the rigor mortis of the I Ching.

  And when Frog McEntire, God's aboriginal hippie, dressed me

  For the drag ball—black midi and cultured pearls,

  Matching bag, a platinum wig from the Dollar Store—

  And squired me across the yard, a skeleton

  Stooped and shat in a can. Four bikers roared

  Up on hogs. He said, "Man, it's happening, and

  I can't fucking believe it." He said, "Too much."

  A bamboo screen, white kitchen, Jim-Ella's crowd

  Raising blond dollops of hash on glowing spoons,

  Gay, petulant, bouffant as Medusa's beauty shop—

  And down the candled hall, black-jacketed Warhol,

  Albino and amphetamined, beside his latest star.

  4

  This is the world sex saved us from: not fame

  But indifference, not the moment of adulation

  But the crowd dispersing through the alleys

  Near the stadium, one season with its star

  Dimming in empathetic roles, the nurse,

  The guidance counselor, the sage of Mini-Pads,

  Ascending the channels, eternities of Prague and Omaha.

  In Carbondale, it comes in snowy, cracked, oblique.

  "It's something in the water," a woman told me,

  But the party soaked its last liqueurs. Jokes sobered.

  A physicist spoke of a new calendar he'd devised,

  Beginning after television, after the bomb. "We are,"

  He said, "so terribly junior to that God."

  When I was a boy, I loved my mother's biscuits

  And feared the dark; deep space; vengeance

  Of the desert prophets driving their vision dogs

  Until the sexual animal was treed in fire.

  "It's better," she said, pulling on lace panties

  Behind the church, "when you believe in hell."

  But it does no good to rub the times together,

  Gabbling on that old string because we are strangers

  In the peace that intervenes between lovemakings.

  Or to see it all in an erupting instant given out

  As when the artsies stroll all in black they know

  It will fly apart, glass city, omnipotent, vulnerable.

  And "God is orgasm," she whispered years ago

  And lay back, small and white, on the dark rug.

  It is not enough. It bores us an
d it works

  As an ending only once unless we come to it without will,

  And we come, stupid and crazy, believing in love,

  And go winding back down the temple's easy stairs,

  Near sleep, plummet past the owl and the mole,

  And Twain wrote of ringworm as divine intervention.

  5

  After a while it occurs to us and at the simplest times

  When the lights go suddenly out and we fumble

  Lampward through the deep clutter of the rooms,

  The past is mainly dark, but not what we thought,

  Squirreled away in a box, all its books shut,

  Its songs and anecdotes, previews of oblivion.

  It will happen again, the terrifying sex, the light

  Flesh makes blazing quietly underground,

  Hendrix and Joplin, Morrison and Allman;

  Talmadge, my childhood friend, Patrick's lover,

  Who sang beautifully "How Great Thou Art"

  And stewarded on the Chicago-London route

  Before expiring, according to the local daily,

  "From ambiguous complications of pneumonia";

  Silly flowers on the ridge at Grayson Highlands,

  Foxglove and wood sorrel, blueprints of mania

  Where we sat and heard the charismatics testify:

  And when God called me to his service, I got

  My hammer and saw, put the ladder in the truck,

  And drove to Mexico. And built His holy church.

  Fog was lifting. Earlier rain had passed

  East, whirled up the Holston watershed,

  And now, as the light of the world came skipping

  And dappling vague rosettes among the stones,

  A man rose from the lee of the highest boulder

  And spoke: Brothers and sisters, strength

  Is not enough. I ate steroids like candy,

  Bulked up and benched five hundred pounds,

  But it was emptiness until I accepted grace

  And gave it up. The money, the cars, the girls.

  And now, pump iron for Him, praise His name—

  Listen, only a thin layer of skin

  Keeps us from squirting into the world.

  6

  This is the last testimony of the last days, made

  On Sunday as cars rattle over the iron bridge

  And on down Chautauqua, a stone and glass chapel

  Founded on tax shelters, a modest Episcopalian miracle.

  Light of the world, this is the joke love makes.

  I was saved in Alabama and backslid to some good

  Loving early in the colicky infancy of the bomb.

  I hope my son won't run with zombies to the end.

  The deal I'd rather make with the dead is fun,

  The victories of peace: clean pillows, luxuries

  Of orange juice and toast, which need no blessing,

  Because the god sleeps, and nothing worships us.

  No prophet rivets us to dread. No demon comes

  On the tails of black jets, only iced tea and soup,

  The Cowboys and the Bears, the endless human hope

  That, backed up to the goal, insists that this

  Is all there will be. This is all there will ever be;

  But if you should read this, far off in the future,

  Small and indefatigable dots, still holding on,

  Still balancing on a blind tentacle of science,

  Praise us that once we lay down without prevention

  And started it, whatever it is salted in the genes,

  Recessive trump that, of its own passiveness, waits

  Through the unplayable hand and survives exactness.

  Praise our uplifted thighs and the cries we made

  As the seed harvest bared the singing nerve. Praise

  Our electrons humming down cables from the split atom.

  Praise the Beatles, W. C. Fields, and Bessie Smith.

  Praise our many knowledges that came from accidents.

  From our six fingers come your corrugating fins.

  From our eyes come the balls of your reticulate feet.

  From our brains your batteries. From our livers

  Your encyclotropic perfumes. And if it is genesis

  You would study, imagine us. We lived here.

  We made our choice between the virus and the germ.

  From Things That Happen Once (1996)

  TV

  All the preachers claimed it was Satan.

  Now the first sets seem more venerable

  Than Abraham or Williamsburg

  Or the avant-garde. Back then nothing,

  Not even the bomb, had ever looked so new.

  It seemed almost heretical watching it

  When we visited relatives in the city,

  Secretly delighting, but saying later,

  After church, probably it would not last,

  It would destroy things: standards

  And the sacredness of words in books.

  It was well into the age of color,

  Korea and Little Rock long past,

  Before anyone got one. Suddenly some

  Of them in the next valley had one.

  You would know them by their lights

  Burning late at night, and the recentness

  And distance of events entering their talk,

  But not one in our valley; for a long time

  No one had one, so when the first one

  Arrived in the van from the furniture store

  And the men had set the box on the lawn,

  At first we stood back from it, circling it

  As they raised its antenna and staked in

  The guy wires before taking it in the door,

  And I seem to recall a kind of blue light

  Flickering from inside and then a woman

  Calling out that they had got it tuned in—

  A little fuzzy, a ghost picture, but something

  That would stay with us, the way we hurried

  Down the dirt road, the stars, the silence,

  Then everyone disappearing into the houses.

  MORTAL SORROWS

  The tortxures of lumbago consumed Aunt Madge,

  And Leah Vest, once resigned from schoolmarming,

  Could not be persuaded to leave the house.

  Mrs. Mary Hogan, after birthing her fifth son,

  Lay bedfast for the last fifty-two years of her life,

  Reporting shooting pains that would begin

  High in her back and shear downward to her feet,

  As though, she said, she had been glazed in lightning;

  Also men, broken on bridges and mills,

  Shell-shocked veterans, religious alcoholics—

  Leldon Kilpatrick, Johnson Suggs, Whitey Carlyle:

  They came and sat there too, leafing through

  Yellowing Pageants and Progressive Farmers;

  One by one, all entered in and talked,

  While the good doctor gargled a dark chaff

  In his pipe and took down symptoms,

  Annotating them on his hidden chart—

  Numbness, neuralgia, the knotted lymph,

  The clammy palms—and then he'd scratch

  His temple's meaningful patch of white

  And scrawl out his unfailing barbiturate prescription

  To be filled by his pharmacist brother-in-law

  Until half the county had gathered as in a lap,

  The quantum ache, the mutiny in every house.

  How much pain, how many diseases

  Consigned to the mythological, the dropped

  Ovaries, the torn-up nerves, what women

  Said, what men wanted to believe? Part of it

  Laughable, I know. Still I want someone

  To see, now that they lie safe in graves

  Beyond the vacant stores, that someone

  Listened and, hearing the wrong at the heart,

  Named it s
omething that sounded real, whatever

  They lived through and died of. I remember

  Mrs. Lyle, who called it a thorn in the flesh,

  And Mr.Appleton, who had no roof in his mouth.

  BEAUTIFUL CHILD

  Because I looked out as I was looked upon

  (Blue-eyed under the golden corm of ringlets

  That my mother could not bring herself

  To have the barber shear from my head),

  I began to sense, as adults approached me,

  That hunger a young woman must feel

  When a lover seizes one breast too long

  On the ideal nipple-balm of the tongue.

  When they lifted me and launched me

  Ceilingward, I seemed to hang there years,

  A satellite in the orbit of their affections,

  Spinning near the rainspot continents

  And the light globe freckled with flies.

  I could smell the week-old syrupy sweat

  And the kerosene of many colognes.

  I could see the veined eyes and the teeth

  Dotted with shreds of lettuce and meat.

  When I touched down, one of them

  Would hold me to the torch of a beard

  And goose my underarms until I screamed.

  Another would rescue me, but leave

  On my cheek the heart-mark of her kiss.

  So I began, at three, to push them away.

  There was no ceremony and few words,

  But, like a woman who has let a man go too far

  And, in one night's moodiness, steps

  Out of a parked car and walks home alone,

  I came suddenly to my life. They

  Did not begrudge me, but turned back

  To the things they had done before,

  The squeaking bed, the voices late at night.

  Mornings I'd crawl beneath the house,

  Dreaming how poignantly tragic my death

  Would seem, but, having thought about it,

  I happily took myself into the darkness

  Of the underground, where I was king.