I am going, Deacon Jones
I went down to the church house
I got down on my bended knee
I prayed, I prayed all night, I prayed
Deacon Jones, pray for me
—John Lee Hooker, “Burnin’ Hell”
I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming unalone is terrible.
—Dewey Dell, As I Lay Dying
The signs are everywhere. The cat drops headless birds, cardinal,
bluejay, something whitewinged, beside the rocker on the front porch.
A diamondback leaves its skin at field’s edge. Heaps of dead wasps
near it, sun-brindled bodies like a funeral pyre in time’s slow flame.
A perfect circle of feathers: yes, you’ll owe more than you have today.
A perfect circle of raised white welts: yes, there will be enough
for dinner tonight. You find a one-antlered deer skull hung
from the branches of a young oak: yes, she’ll come back someday.
Bag worms like prayer lanterns at wood’s edge, sizzle
of cicadas in the trees, a hundred ratchets spinning on the car
of the dog-bayed August sun. The signs are everywhere. The dogs
got another one of the chickens. A mimosa drops its flares
into the river, the light of years resurfacing reaches you. The light
of other towns. Other tongues, older tongues. Issaquena, Choctaw
for deer river. You say it to the crumpled deer body roadside,
tiger lilies blazing on their wicks in the ditch. Issaquena.
The first two county seats are now ghost towns on this alluvial plain,
buckshot soil, bottomland. Ghost towns, ghost tongues, we, too,
are alluvial, & bear the traces of others upon us. This county is no
dry bones, this county will rise again, our neighbor rumbles, the one who wears
a gator’s tooth around his neck for luck. Seven types of fog, seven types
of rattlers. Ache of crepe myrtle blossoms by the road, white ones, fuchsia,
ache of all we cannot bring ourselves to ask: pocketless, starless,
what can a body keep, what can a body bear? You must ask yourself,
the river, the dark, you must ask a hundred times, because so many
have gone into both without an answer. Benthic ourselves,
alluvial, we bear the signs, names, petals, ashes of a church fire
on the air, we bear the light of names no one knows how to say anymore.
when it hits the windshield—
the attendant asks
at the last station before the two-lane blacktop
hits the Natchez Trace: foot-smoothed path
from Natchez to Nashville: hundred-foot pines,
Pegasus & Lyra-blossomed magnolia, crepe myrtles
like burning cars roadside: his half-limp almost
the same as my father’s,
arthritis in his knee radiating
like starlight in water: a riddle with an answer,
one we ask instead of asking about our own
last words, last questions, even at this lonely
outpost, where rusty ceiling fans chase their tails
all day, & a mini pagoda of disposable cameras,
each with their own
empty window, wait
for a figure to wave back at us: the Bible opened
on the counter to a dog-eared Psalm 88,
& mahalath leannoth (to be read at the suffering
of afflictions) circled in red: a lineage that begins
with a half-limp, & goes back generations
of Primitive Baptists,
Hard Shell Baptists,
back to a man owned by another: lineage, the falling
of one day into the next: what we are heir to,
what we are at the mercy of: Old Trace, what flickers
in the blood? : something kin to the twenty centuries
of dark in the Pharr Mounds, burial tumuli a few miles
from this place:
something like the sixth taste
on the tongue, or the seventh, if it exists: unanswerable:
how long this season of white hair, how long
will Yahweh stay silent: how much of this galaxy’s
light, this river of heaven, is the light of white dwarfs:
dead stars: where else do death & eros collide
in the world: burst sacks
of thistle still on the stalk
bulge like eyeballs in the next field, waiting
for the right wind out of the cypress swamps
to carry the seeds: as we wait, halfhearted, off-balance,
for something beyond us to carry us, to get us
through another day, to bear these frailties—
its ass.
Even now the letters & syllables begin to
Ravel themselves around their own disappearances
As the speakers forget them: Mephis, Missippi:
like phantom limbs, like a
Shroud of fingerprints lifted from arrowheads
Underneath the bodies. This is how a place vanishes. The letters
Rise toward names already beyond the horizon.
Even now they dissolve on our tongues, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael
Schwerner . . .
Grief’s a drowned palomino, all fifteen hands of her.
We’ll spend our days tracing those hands on this gravel road
off a gravel road off county blacktop. All the names return
at day’s end, whitetail hour, with the tiger lilies dying in a ditch,
all them boys still missing, their mouths full of moonlight
& Issaquena County clay. Go on, do a Google search:
the first three it suggests are Issaquena County jail MS,
Issaquena County jail, & Issaquena County prison.
The boys may as well drive their snorting short boxes
& half tons (half-pints of clear shine beneath the seat)
right through the glittering barbed wire. If there’s a hole
in heaven’s side, it’s been worn in a little at a time,
like the Natchez Trace, worn in with our bodies.
When the children grow up, they’ll break
your heart, don’t kid yourself. Because everyone else will.
We’ve seven types of rattlers, & how many kinds of luck?
That’s all you got in a county of bottomland forest
in buckshot soil, & water on the way to the Delta. Find somebody.
All you are is a confluence of needs. My Earl,
he once brought me a glass of water when I was coughing
in the middle of the night, wrapped in the T-shirt he was wearing.
Find somebody that tender. Two hundred years too late
for the Choctaw, maybe it’s not too late for us.
There’s plenty of shades in these woods for the shoes left on the porch.
And God gives, Mama, the way bridges do—
gives out when you’re halfway across.
There’s a hole in heaven where some sin slips through,
& that’s where the Mississippi’s rolling to.
Some place that forgets, somewhere beyond our loss.
And even God gives, the way guitar strings do:
sounds our lives as the earth’s sounded by the dew.
Too many turned out, laid up, hospice or big house.
But there’s a hole in heaven where some sin slips through,
so make a break if you see it, the way crows
go for the eyes first. Might be redemption in the dross
because God can give, Mama, the way beauty do—
gives back the pieces it took, less a few:
drowned horses & petals, those beyond breath or shoes.
There’s a hole in heaven where some sin slips through—
& one or two of us might slip out of Issaquena too.
We’re left with hard luck, hard prayer, & a high cross.
Because even God gives out, the way hearts do—
but there’s a hole in heaven where some sin slips through.
What did you make?
A perfect coin, that bears no face, that will balance on any eyelid.
A weightless blade to cut the nooses down from the trees.
How did you learn your craft?
The earth is a beautiful sieve: we are what has been caught.
I saw how hunger curved the coyote’s ribs.
No, how did you learn your craft?
I bore a thorn in my palm for seven days.
I smoothed ashes upon the river & watched the gray oracle figures disappear.
What did you dream?
A forge beyond the sparks of the stars. The faces on the cooling waters . . .
I traced the Hand that traced us first.
How did you forget?
I watched steel break like glass.
What are the stars but furnaces? What is between them but all we’ve forgotten?
No, how did you forget?
I unlearned by holding a bracelet of hair.
I weighed the white bones of the disappeared.
Where are you going?
Where the thrown arrowhead points.
I hear the river whistle ahead of its bones.
What will you leave us?
A metal softer than flesh, lighter than song or shadow.
We come to know the world as a veil learns a face.
Someone pulls the cork
& the evening amberlight drains through the cypress,
mimosa blooms shimmering like the blur of hands
before the abracadabra
& the day disappears,
the way the congregation of this abandoned
white clapboard church did.
Here, some hundred miles from the twin-cabined dogtrot where Lewis died by his own hand
or another’s,
no one’s sure,
these Hard Shell Baptists, the old school’s old school,
refused even instruments in their worship:
anything except voice was mere decoration.
And beyond this place bent on a place beyond
(some had one eye on heaven
& one peeled for revenuers)
the Old Trace begins, footworn path, begun by hunters
who followed herds
to Tennessee salt licks,
if the story holds,
the same way the hollow in heaven’s side,
if it’s still there,
has been worn in a little at a time,
its heart unreachable.
In the encroaching woods behind the church,
slash pine, longleaf, red elm & bitter pecan,
black moths unlip from the dark
near a pond hidden in the long grass like a stolen kidney.
Here hard prayer began like a thirst
for salt.
Here they laid their old selves in the water,
this Mississippi mudpuddle
become a river Jordan,
become another self as the fog lifts from it,
translucent as the next life.
No voices here any longer,
only skeeters on an air that was once hymn-haunted—
because there’s nothing ornamental in this place,
here we resemble what we’ve lost,
become a palimpsest of what’s missing.
Here the cotton shall rise again like white tongues,
white Pentecostal flames, & the body,
the body shall gutter in our mouths,
the wounds sound our depths,
& the rattler prove our faith.
You should know how to jump a car,
& how to change a tire, my father once told me.
To that I’d add where to buy the best shine
in town, which is always out of someone’s trunk.
In Oxford, look for an ’89 Cherokee,
rust-mottled white, & tinted dark as ink,
because a woman named Chaz will sell a jelly jar
with hardly a charcoal speck. She’s a disciple
of string theory—not the one that says strings
send their 2D worldsheet through spacetime,
one candidate for The Theory of Everything—
but the shine version: she plays an old violin
in a barn to the sealed jars & a horse, Bill.
They don’t have ears, she says, maybe the vibrations
soften the shine some. She’s got her own set
of must-knows: how to make an easy grand
hauling cigarettes across state lines, how to grow
your own blue corn for the stuff. How to kick
the other stuff, blue flame, burn spoon, dying horse
or heroin, the appetite goes first, she says.
You should know what it’s like to bury
a horse, to spend a morning digging a piano-size
grave, for twenty cents. Three jars in, she tells me
something. We wrapped chains around one
that got stuck in a drinking hole. Her rump in the air,
chunks of horse flesh missing: coyotes
we’d hear at night as we drifted off to sleep.
When the chains tightened as the tractor heaved
the mare’s belly gave, & her body was pulled
from a womb-wet colt. You should know
some things stay with you the rest of your life.
I even saw that colt as I held up the ultrasound pic
the first time, she says. The birth of your first-born
will wreck every part of you. And I know this.
I’ve held that picture in my hands. I’ve heard
that heart, that stunning wingbeat on the speaker,
that otherworldly whistling, an ambulance passing
by you, if you’re stretchered out in the back
at the same time. Like hearing a helicopter
underwater, or talking to a friend on the phone
when he’s in freefall. I should know by now I’ll never
know all the strings that pull me this way or that.
I mean thirst, & history, mistakes & all, I mean
the way we become our parents, so I know enough
to know I don’t know shit, but that heartbeat,
that unborn heartbeat did to me what the late train horn
does to the plains, what the blood moon does
to midnight. This week of her first dreams, body
in Golden Mean proportions already, like Chaz’s violin.
Zeising once measured the body & found a 3:2 ratio
in length, which is a Perfect Fifth on a scale—
so who sang us into being, who first struck our hearts
into rivering with a few slides along the strings?
Even this beauty is an eyelash next to the end we share.
All I see, all I hope to, is a length of days past
mine when I look hard at the ultrasound clouds,
at the face upon the waters. The way Chaz looks
at the sun too long sometimes, so the burnspots spark,
then coalesce, until a blueblack colt walks out of the sun.
Blue smoke on the marrow horizon line,
heaven’s half-ton a quart low,
burning a little oil as it goes
across the Yocona. Always just beyond us,
dead languages pinned like butterflies in its trunk,
its haul of dead tongues,
a shade riding shotgun.
A ways below, mine won’t be quiet.
I have my dead & I have let them go, it says.
The grief that I hear is my life’s echo,
but what it hears is beyond me.
Death row inmates banging on their bars
in solidarity this Day Of.
A mother hearing her son’s heart beat in the chest of another,
faint as a moondog’s cry.
The sound of the year passing, another year at war,
but they say there’ll be an end to the turning of the years.
They say the angel of history is blindfolded,
& around here
they say a child’s first gun should be an AK,
it’s that hard to screw up.
Hard for me to imagine.
Except maybe for guns,
a thousand years ago they had a charm for almost everything.
A charm for the journey. One against bees.
One for the white wings falling
through evening’s corn silk shine,
dove season. Someone above the bag limit,
if I counted the shots right.
One for the sound of the next life,
rattle of cicadas in the trees, fragments of bone
in a tin cup.
Æcerbot, the Field Remedy, for unfruitful lands—
but this land has seen such a yield
of strange fruit.
A charm for everything, except maybe for ghosts.
And where would you begin.
A litany of earth & sky & eros,
baptisia alba, cumulonimbus, white camellia,
skin-at-your-lover’s heel,
dark of the larynx.
If you love this world, the Good Book says,
love of the Father is not in you,
but I don’t know that I can help it,
the body of the world I love begins with the body
of the last one missing.
I have my dead & I have let them go.
The grief that I hear is my life’s echo.
It’s departure inscribed on the air in the October evening,
six & ten foot flights of grasshoppers arcing across vacant lots
gone to seed, the wakes & screws & contrails
of falling leaves
& planes circling DFW & Love Field.
Somewhere out there is the step I lost between my twenties & thirties
Somewhere the last word my wife said in sleep is still echoing.
And the hour we lost between Santa Fe & Dallas must be somewhere above
this woman busking a waterless spillway of grasshoppers
& skateboard pilgrims
in a town where the calls of distant trains meet at last.
What an embarrassment of riches she has
to pick on her guitar—
three year drought blues, or seventeen year,
depending on who you ask.
The lifted truck blues, rollin’ coal blues, both barrels,
duallies & half tons & short boxes.
The AR blues, extended mag blues.
Skeeter bite blues, the West Nile roulette we play
each time we take a walk,
toxic subprime loans blues, & more underwater mortgages
in these neighborhoods than Atlantis, if we ever find it.
And aside from the fracking blues & the little earthquakes
that attend us,
is there anything in the blues of the ten thousand places
on the disappeared,
or the lone child migrant
no one seems to know what to do with,
is there anything from that catalogue
for dove season,
some evernote alive in this afterlife of autumn
to trace the score the white wings
leave
on the air as they plunge.
I keep hoping for something after last call,
in this twilight’s
twilight, something more, some grace I won’t recognize
’till it has a hold of me,
some turn card, some other I can’t explain, a mark
the ineffable leaves upon us,
faint as the white tails that ghost through
cattle rail & thicket & steel fence,
through lost hours
& last words,
more flame than flesh, more flicker
than tongue,
like the translucent bodies, the ones past all pain,
the radiant ones the preachers say we’re migrating to.
The salvage yard’s forty acres of brokedown
busted-up wrecks, where we once got fifty bucks
for our grocery getter, an ’89 wagon.
My father & I stalk aisles of cars & trucks
for replacement parts—rims, belts, compressor.
Pops a hood—holds a lighter up in the skull,
runs a hand along the radiator.
Nothing lasts, but nothing’s irreplaceable—
except for the faulty parts he passed down.
Same lousy knees, leaky valves—blood flow
half-slowed in his Gremlin heart. Same depression,
same blown hippocampus. All this, yet a grin
when he sees the old ’Vette: sixteen again, all show
& fro, gunning down Main St for the horizon.
Out of the perfect circles of feathers
on lawns & roadsides,
out of the rotting maws of javelinas,
from the bowed heads of wilting wildflowers,
from bathtub rings around lakes,
& the exposed Indian graves once in twenty feet of water
the drought rises to walk amongst us,
white hair
& translucent skin a sheer rippling
above the trees, body of vapor & heat,
limbic shadows knotting
& untying beneath the bean & pecan trees.
Diminish, diminish, it says
with its mouth full of feathers,
hot finger in my mouth,
in the mouths of every one of the yet-to-be-transfigured.
What do we mean by shelter, it asks us,
the same question castoff shoes
& empty gallon bottles in ranch fields ask us.
Add that to the others we’re in the midst of answering—
how far north do the narcocorridos carry?
What are the coyotes charging, human traffickers,
what’s the exchange rate
on the peso black market?
The skies are cloudless, answerless—
only a distant thunder on the horizon
that tells you it’s dove season,
that the white-striped wings will soon be falling.
Those walking the fields will stay invisible—
they will show only as white blazes on X-rays of eighteen wheelers,
lives hidden amidst ripening mangoes,
the unseen body that walks beside you,
like an undertow of feathers,
like a call that disappears
the moment it’s answered.
tonight at the poker table I counted
a hundred years in the mills
good living hard life they said
while we waited for the river card
one to burn & one to turn
I could never catch a card to save my life
but somewhere up there’s the luck I’ve heard of
sweet as manna luck or grace prayer or
pair of pocket rockets whatever you want
to call it that promised land just across
the Jordan just past the badlands
better lucky than good
better forgotten than lucky or forgiven
if it’s exes or God or the IRS
so I leave my language for leaving
on the table with the one day of rain
this summer with my words for mercy
& silence &/or God (who would I speak them to
anyway) (words that come between me
& God) words as quiet as
whiskey evaporating in barrels the angels’ share
so they say wherever they are they walk
with the lives we might have lived
had the cards fell a little better I leave it all
on the table stray bills & lean years & names
of old lovers & walk out into the night
a possum kingdom of empty streets
In the sound of pellet snow falling
on still-green leaves, magnolia & oak,
I hear ten thousand brushes on the high hat,
someone whispering for Elijah,
time scraping ghost towns
from the map.
I hear the last percussive rasp
of the song cut off
by the bone saw’s cry
yesterday in the slaughterhouse.
A vanished song for the vanished,
one for the windows of ice
the wind’s cleared from the snow
on the reservoir. Lakeside,
I catch myself thinking the patches
are all the nights we won’t get back—
if I look long enough
I’ll see a face I loved.
I don’t know who I’m waiting for.
Childhood friends, old loves.
Maybe my grandfather’s face,
unmarked by death.
Maybe the pages of my life’s history
in the unreadable scrawl
of the town drunk will appear
in the onyx glass,
color of the night hours
that find my grandmother awake
belted to her insomnia.
Give it time. Soon the faces
will begin to surface
like coins, like a well
giving up its wishes. And when they do,
they’ll have no more to say
than we do, when I ask them
what this morning is the empty
throat of, what happens to all
flesh, or just what the question is,
if our passing’s the answer.
Someone pulls a burning splinter from the devil’s thigh
& holds it up to the sun—
August in Texas.
And slides it down the frets to get the dying cicadas going, half wheeze & half-halted gospel hum,
if it’s Blind Willie a hundred years ago, Blind Pilgrim
born a stone’s throw from here,
if it’s a knife blade sliding down the strings,
Jesus gon’ make up my dying bed.
In ’45 it was a bed in his burned-out house,
nowhere else to go,
wet bed to keep cool in the Texas summer,
that became his dying bed, when the hospital turned away
a man with malarial fever,
because he was blind, or black, or both.
Preached & sang in the streets
to people he couldn’t see,
if my wings should fail me Lord,
like the cloud of witnesses
the author of Hebrews says we’re surrounded by,
whoever that was,
we might never know.
Here, to this cloud of the wanted & missing who look down
at us from billboards, hushed against
the shimmy-shake of locusts buzzing into the call of the coal train
heading north, armature of the next life,
armature or echo
of the day after our last,
to this cloud add the passengers & crew making an emergency landing at DFW,
meet me in the middle with another pair.
I was on that flight last week,
can hear the flight attendant saying wear your seatbelt low
like J-Lo wears pants,
plane low
over the million white RV hookups at the Texas Motor Speedway
I once thought were headstones,
over the thirty foot monoliths on an unfinished I-35 ramp,
henges of a disappeared people,
highway henges of a road into the sky.
I count up all the times my life’s been out of my hands
& arrive at grace,
at a number I cannot know,
number of wings that will fail in this world—
how long ’till I’ll need you to meet me in the middle
of the air? How long
will faith mean a belief
in what I cannot see?
Sister says another day another dollar.
Sister spins in the living room, little feet chirping
on the chipped & faded hardwood,
counted bones & silk of skin in the air then not, shimmer
& arch,
shimmy & spin, of the air & not. She says teacher says
a crate of tap shoes washed up on a beach somewhere,
someday she’ll have a pair. In North Korea, she says,
they have billboards that say We Have Nothing to Envy.
Weightless
shadow on the clapboard walls, only something pressed
of hollow bones could turn like that, living shadow
a thousand socks tied to balloons
are floating across the border right now,
winter socks for the coming cold, for those who have nothing.
Sister, I can hardly hear the voice on the radio from the next
room over your feet, & that’s alright,
Little Half-Flame, sometimes driving backwoods gravel I spin the dial
& those voices edge in & out
of me, & I’m glad someone is putting tongue to hunger,
someone who’s arisen from a shotgun shack
or one of the fine condos
of Section 8, someone who’s traced the tongue marks
in the cans of grease out back, & understands
there ain’t much to get us through,
& even if out of earshot, even if the voices travel through us
like the unnumbered particles that Perseid each & every second
through the dark skies
our bodies conceal, I’m glad someone’s mumbling the charms
that had a woman’s bra wire deflect the bullet last week,
had a blanket save a boy the week before,
a bullet that whistled through wood & drywall
& was stopped at the skin by wool.
Numb-fumbling voodoo, bluebird bones & moonlight,
saint or Santeria, whatever works
in this evening of haloes & absences:
white soap shavings around Martin on his chair
(after whittling all that’s not angel from the soap bar),
vigil candles guttering, auraed by the perfect circle
they make of their flames. Sneakers hanging by their laces.
And a cloud of beating mothwings around a streetlight,
little nebula,
heart of dust & wings around blue sodium.
Whatever works, forty ounces or pipe dream,
blue train or jellyroll, whatever the moonlight can make of us,
here where the gandy dancers once flickered by the rails,
sister let these tongues attend us, those we cling to,
o flesh that fails, that falls from another flesh.
Light & dust. Of the air & earth.
Let the rivers run through their throats, fine
alluvium, southern tongues come find us
if the new shoes never show,
if our angels are still out of reach,
earshot & eyeshot,
southern tongues leave us shining for
another day.