III

BYE & BYE I’M GOING TO SEE THE KING

Appalachian Vowels

 

soften the day’s glare a little,
long vowels soft as the footsteps
of the lost regiment said to walk these woods,
soft even through the teeth of a mechanic
with a plug of chaw in his cheek.
He breaks a branch from a dogwood
(in a soil that still gives up musket balls)
next to the empty puddle-shot parking lot,
while we shoot the shit

because the day’s done

& the bill’s settled. He’s as many stitch-lines
on his hands & face as I do—
& in this we are kin, misspent or
well-spent youth. No one knows his time,
or what’s around the corner, & in this,
too, we are kin, hundred bones &
twenty-one grams of soul, by one guess.
He scattered his father’s ashes
last month upon one of the nameless hills
near here that hold generations—
just a little cloud on the air, he says.
Cloud that opens a hollow in us
where it rains for years,

it’s the dead, not

the living, who demand the most.
We bear them as these Blue Ridge mountains
surrounding this hole-in-the-wall garage
bear their dynamited ridges,

blue aura

still there though, here to the end
of time, blue shine, some trick of light
& isoprene walking the hills—
lost regiment, blue shades all the way
down to the Nantahala.
I don’t know who’ll be in the ascension,
but today the dust we are rises,
kicked up off a gravel road by a short box
three fields over,

white shroud upon the air

like the shade who came forward from the shades
to greet Aeneas, have you come at last . . .

Auramancy

divination by auras

It’s Johnny Cash on the little boombox
I carry as we climb the grain silo ladders to get a bird’s eye view
of the town, of our dozen streets,
then the father hen will call his chickens home,

a little eschatology in the early evening—
& you ask, why divinations a moment before

you press your hand to your head:
the town blurring on its edges, I know from past episodes,

like static breaking in, like the ghost chatter of phantom birds
on radar, the green flecks no one could explain
moving against the wind.

And the lights, every light begins to drift closer.
Aura, you say, quietly. A migraine coming.

Like reading the red sky at morning, the sailor’s warning,
or looking for tomorrow
in chicken entrails, tea leaves, casting locks of hair

when the I Ching goes missing,

as if your body had a handle on the what’s-to-come,
o Cassandra, o Isaiah,

your body somehow tuned to the turning of the days,
the way moths steer by the stars, or animals scatter

to higher ground

before the tsunami hits.
I never answered your question—it was reading the Inferno,
meeting the doomed one by one, being moved

by the damned, yes, because who amongst us hasn’t dreamed
a passion that would condemn us to a whirlwind

of bodies,

but it was the fortune-tellers that shook me—
forced to carry their heads in their hands with their gaze fixed
behind them always.

And for what.

Trying to look through the signs into
tomorrow. Who hasn’t looked to the stars

to see if someone’s coming back, who hasn’t seen a body
hovering between this world & next

in the monarch butterflies

rising from milkweed?
You would have laughed,
but all I wanted was to gather them once,
all those condemned sightseers,
because no father hen was coming to take them home.

Are there other windows into the future
your body can look into? Could you look long enough

to see twelve hundred snow geese falling from the sky over Idaho next week?

We begin to climb down, rung by rung, your eyes
closed, slow as Dante down the devil’s back.

Cars shake down Main’s cobblestones. A siren blares
in the distance. You might outdo the MRI,
find the invisible tear in a tendon, tease out

the names from the next round of pink slips.
Get us through the day. Steer us, get us

home, so there would be no pile of flowers in the middle
of the street. No boombox on the sidewalk, playing a loop

of the DA reciting charges
against the cops, over & over.

We might know the hands on the litter that will bear us.
We might kiss those hands before we go.

Reliquaries

 

It’s a brand new day, the greasy spoon’s sign
has recited each day for the last ten years.

18-wheelers haul their hundred hands of empty space
through an air hallowed by the smoke of a thousand-acre grassfire.

New roads take on the shape of the old
the way rivers tongue the shapes of the drowned, eternal rush hour, eternal city:

beneath the floodlights on the side of the highway
the blue eye of the welder’s torch snaps
open, a circular saw spins, disc galaxy, roulette wheel
if the ball’s skipping through the working hours

of the rest of their lives,

these workers, then bites into concrete,

teeth through stone.

Mouth full of cinders,
the earth has begun to reel back
its lines of chlorophyll.
Birch shadows walk on their toes on their way
to nowhere. Bark strips skiff from the sycamores,

pale coracles,

& set off into the world. Through a screen of falling
rust-shot leaves it’s hard to tell the planes from the planets,
but I know one is flight 90, where last week a man
confided that he’s collected over twenty thousand Pillsbury Doughboy dolls.

I tried to remember the name of the horn player
who used to play a club for a plate of spaghetti—something about being in-between cities, in-between lives & hours,
had left me otherwise wordless, with nothing else to offer,

with nothing more to say about need.

Once, I rounded a corner & came face-to-face
with a naked woman behind a door of glass.

I saw her

everywhere I went the next few days,
each time I saw myself in a window. In the canal below.
I read a billboard a mile from the glass door: Voodoo Inverso:
someday I will learn the spell

to reverse

my trafficker’s curse.

Ten thousand days into my life, Lord, & not one more promised.
Ten thousand days & I’ve nothing

to say in light
of the overpass fire in front of me,

as this city drains

from its own windows as the sun rises.

You can take ten thousand steps & get no nearer to heaven,
someone once said, but the smoke

is halfway there. If the overpass is a temple,
it’s a Parthenon blueprinted

by the stars

that are now fading overhead,
one dedicated to elsewhere,

that negative mirror,

a thousand times more air than concrete, more not there
than there: a dozen pillars & a cement roof,

nameless place you only know by the places
you’re on the way to: a via negativa

of every place you’ve been. If the ashes on the air
are inch-long vanishing points of veils,
this temple had a million.

And I’ll be its augur. Already I can see the bouquets
& votives left there for its priestess, still buckled

in her Corolla, her name unremembered everywhere.

Silence

 

Milczenie is the Polish word for silence
that couldn’t be translated—
not just silence, but not talking,
keeping quiet—

like the other end

of the disconnected rotary phone
in Japan, in a lone phone booth

on top of a hill, outside a cemetery—
or a blue begging bowl held up
to your ear.
As when the mourning doves go still
when I approach. Or how the dog

doesn’t move while I wash his each & every paw,
then his belly, the pus
the vet can’t explain matted in the winter fur.

Suds in the grass,
& fallen apple petals, the size of beads
on rosaries recovered in the Texas desert,

Galilee to Golgotha

in a heartbeat, where

are the fingers that counted prayers across

the border, across the years? Always there
& we never see them.
And so every road is an Emmaus road.

I talk so much. How often mercy
seems so far away it’s almost
starlight. I’ve Hikmet on this phone right now

saying we must feel this sorrow
for the world must be loved this much

if you’re going to say I lived . . .

& again I don’t know what to say,

I’m a word halfway

migrated to another language,

a guitar’s shadow,
a hollow bone in red dirt,

I’m footprints left in the Rio Grande.

Nocturne with Fitted Absences

“The book of moonlight is not written yet / nor half begun . . .”

—Charles Wright

Flame-limned shreds of leaf & wood drift on the air
from a wildfire two hollers over
as if the library of Alexandria were burning again,

a shroud of smoke

thrown across the stars. In a moonless backyard
I stoop to pick up clothes fallen from the line,

hands & knees, O Lord,

hands & knees—like the man who paced out the underworld,
if Dante’s right, though his name escapes me,

the circles there nowhere near

as perfect as grief’s, or joy’s—
in this city of cinders,

looking for little patches of dark a little darker than the grass—

only a glint of a letter here, there, as a name, a logo,
somehow picks up light in the lightless yard.

The wind hurries away, talking in its sleep,
stray syllables that must meet somewhere—

& somewhere, in a depth I have known
& cannot know,
sometime this week my unborn child
swallows for the first time, though I cannot remember

if there’s even a tongue yet.

I know that somewhere the moon breaches for air.

I know that my bones are the spines of nameless books,

& the pages of our flesh have begun to be recited in the dark waters,

letters of sugars & proteins through the month-old blood,

tongue, thirst, sleep . . .

Appalachian Farewell

 

It’s sluice & sieve this side of the mountain today,
it’s TNT & hill heave, & a long slide,

until this side is the other.

Appalachia’s a green speck in the eye
of God, a speck man’s been working to remove
for the past century or two,

but for now it’s dust in our teeth,
it’s a missing mountain shoulder

& a missing vowel in our mouths.

Still, I’d like to see the sluice rise for once,
& the Flesh drift back to Word,
if I had words to describe it—debris settling
on a river’s hairpin turn now, the sound of the world falling

back to the world. I’d like to see the coal dust transfigure
into someone whose name is beyond me

(dust still high in the sunlight),

someone too radiant to recognize,
who will speak when I don’t know which side I’m on.

The Trick

 

I’ve always loved that scene in The Seventh Seal
where Jof, poor broke Jof the juggler, rushes back
to tell his wife Mia that he’s just seen the Virgin & Child,
so close to me that I could have touched her, but Mia
is skeptical, wants to know what they’ll eat this winter,
wants to know how their son Mikael will have a better life.
And Jof says his son will be an acrobat, or a great juggler,
one that can do the one impossible trick—to halt a ball
in midair. Impossible, Mia says. For us, he replies.
But not for him. A trick for the Illusion Hall of Fame,
with the Fabled Bullet Catch, Houdini’s vanishing
elephant, or today’s, which include the woman who
awoke forty-five minutes after being pronounced dead,
& the lab that created a whirlpool of polaritons,
particles with properties of both light & matter.
Resurrection & transfiguration aside, the trick most days
is just getting through the day. Kids to school on time,
pizza delivered in fifteen minutes, how to leave a bottle
alone. Yesterday my thirty-fourth year left its last glyphs
on the walls of my bones. Today I found out I’m going
to be a father. And today the trick is managing this rising
tide of panic, & excitement, & God knows what else,
as I drive with my wife, five weeks along, to the doctor,
every ache of her past week scrutinized. Each bloodspot.
Impossible one, you’ll double in size this week.
And again next week, poppy seed to sweet pea,
if you do not give up. Even the light that enters her eyes
comes to you, as it becomes vitamin D, & reaches you
through the rivers of her body. This is the way light
becomes blood—as the Word, too, became flesh,
we are told. And our words, too, our prayers, must change
flesh—even a body alive in a time before the dream
of language feathers, & unfolds, heart the one still point
in your trembling cloud, yet to start its savage countdown.
Be ceaseless. Turn in that darkness you darken.