IV

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

Southern Update: Triptych

 

The FD still doesn’t know how the man caught fire.
The PD still doesn’t know how an inmate escaped

from the infirmary—a guard had to knock down the door
to the room, only to find translucent tubes thrown

across the empty bed,

blood blown along the needle.
Keep an eye out for him, they say.

But every road’s a Damascene road around here,
with this inmate, with the paperless migrants

said to walk the roads & fields beside us (does anyone ever see
them?), & sometimes, when the day’s just right

or just gone,

the shades of those driven from their homes in Quakertown
& across the railroad tracks to Salomon’s Hill a century ago—

you can guess why—

walk through the late evening afterlight

they’re stitched of.
Are we all the roads we’ve crossed in the towns we’ve lived?
Is that how we’ll sum up our lives,
by what we’ve left behind? Or the sum of our doubts?

We still don’t know exactly what brings on labor.
Baby on the way, I don’t trust myself
or my doubts, or God, though sometimes

I can’t tell them apart.

Tonight I backed away from Him
as if from a bootlegger with a ten gauge.

But your soul’s the still,

He said, reading my mind,
I’m only the wound I’ve blown open in you

& the first breath after.
When they emerged from hell
& washed up on the shores of Purgatory, beneath four stars,

light for those

who could not look upon Your light,
Virgil washed Dante’s face,

then broke a reed to wear around his waist,
a symbol of humility—you cannot continue

until you realize that you’re powerless
to continue. To climb is to surrender each & every moment.

Then another reed grew in its place:
a sanctification attended by a miracle.

Dear Ghost
who walks beside me, in this story I would give everything away,
even prayer,

if mother & daughter are safe,

I would break for their sakes,

I pray.

Dear Ghost, the impossible migration
of my wife’s organs—her abdominal muscles split in half
& pushed to the side of her ribcage,

liver & spleen like balloons

against the ceiling of her abdominal cavity—has come to an end.

How do you know when to take her to the hospital,
my father said on the phone to my grandmother

when I was on the way.

When she makes you cry to look at her.

And we’re there, or almost there, give or take
a minute or two, a contraction, wince, grimace,

a lone cry

from a room away, dear Ghost, stay close,

firstborn of the dead

stay close for this birth.
Things become whole once in a while, if you’re lucky
or good. Five plates in my daughter’s skull are fusing together,

right now,

as she descends through the birth canal.

And what does one say to a daughter?

Language is the fire that survives us.

New calves follow their mothers along the fenceline

in the fields outside the city, tail end

of wildflower season,
bean tree blooms bang their drums on the color palette of the world,

magnolia blossoms blaze through waxy leaves, white as the slip

of the devil’s wife,

O Lord, their afterimage burning ships

that keep sinking out of sight.

This town is every town. Still a long breadline at the foodbank.
Still segregated, by & large,
except for Friday nights, some of us still

must raise our young

to raise their hands.

And what does one say to a daughter?

For every pardon, a hundred more in the jug.

For the first glimpse of her head—once
a moon in clouds on the ultrasound,

moon that shifts each tide in us—

ten shades in the middle of the street.

For every wet strand of her hair, every word of Ugolino
on his tongue, what it has—no, who

it has tasted.

Letter to My Daughter Perhaps Someday

 

It’s the little things that matter, the gurus & diamond companies
keep telling us. Too often I look through my shoelaces into the earth,

& miss the semaphore of bows & loop-de-loops before I walk out,
today, into a too-early spring day with you, sleeping in one arm.

Secret language of shoes, those little boats you tie up to unmoor,
what conspiracy will it be today, where are they plotting to take us?

Knots, language in which you can untie yourself from the world,
from the likely & the possible, words you can cut in half.

Maybe there’s a knot that could stand in for robin in Inupiat,
language of the Alaskan Eskimos, since there is no word for robin,

they’ve never needed one: lariats & trefoils in horsehair or blue ribbons
for nape & tail feather, a Portuguese bowline for hollow bones (is it true

they walk out into the next snowstorm when it’s their time to go?).
Last night I dreamed a knot of your hair drifted on a river, just beyond

my reach. A perfect despair. A perfect circle of hair, though that might be
impossible, even electrons have rough edges, even the circles

of the underworld, & the gold record borne on the Voyager spacecraft
that drifts forever, like the Hunter Gracchus, through space,

even that record with one hundred hellos scratched in one hundred
languages has its flaws. Scratched like your face, as you Houdini

out of your swaddle straightjacket & jab yourself with your fingernails
when you startle awake. Love is the dream of the dying, I want to tell you,

or maybe just another dying, some bloodknot of light that weaves us
to each other, but you’re beyond language—or yet to recognize it

in your thirty days upon this earth. You wrap your hand around
my finger—a circle, if the diameter is all the days I’ll be missing you,

& even in this circle there is an infinite pi that holds our lives somewhere
in its sea of decimals—as it begins to snow on this lonely avenue.

Snows right through my chest when I watch you sleep. What does your
tomorrow look like? What do your dreams look like the day after?

Forgive me my failings. My lack of ambition. I thought my shoes
would take me somewhere. I have no way to tell you what your hair

is like in my hand, on this day, one of the last days I’ll have more hair
than you. You may as well be in space, where the earth

is a bluewhite circle far away, a rounded lily, a boutonnière on the lapels
of space. And tomorrow, or a day far hence I hope, a perfect flower

on my dark suit, when I’m laid out, when you let go of my hand.

Nocturne &/or Aubade with Horses

 

And when a god allowed it to speak
one of Achilles’ two immortal horses

said a god had killed

its mortal chariot mate, & that Achilles, too,
would be struck down by a god.

And they wept when Patroklos died.
And three midnights now I’ve waked from a dream of two horses,
brown mare & little sorrel,

hardly ten hands high,

that lived next to me when I was a child,

three midnights now

I’ve waked to walk the windows of the house—
as I once did, as a child, to find my grandmother walking the house,
who learned English by memorizing the Psalms,

I will lay me down in peace & sleep,

for Thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety.
Tonight or this morning a mourning dove,
even this late, even this early,

poor-mouthing our riches,

our memories, our past days,
even as, there—
& there, my daughter, hardly two hands,
my hands, at two months, cries out in her sleep,

soft as the weeping of a deathless horse.
We dream more in the first three years
of our lives than the rest, but where do they go,
where are the dream horses stabled?
Somewhere close to the mercies we’ve been shown,
maybe, the ones we didn’t deserve.

Tomorrow’s already here,

on our skin, our tongues,

baker’s hour, hangman’s,
& I’ve given up on tonight’s,
but there’s another sleep, love,

one I’m closer to

than you, if all goes right, if we’re lucky or good,

& though I’ve asked the dream horses
when it’s my time to go,
they, like Xanthus, like the future itself,
have been struck dumb.