V

LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE ON ME

Southern Divinations II

 

dog with a dead chicken tied to its neck

copperhead body curled upon a shovel blade
steel gleam between head & body

I want to believe somewhere in the world
her departure was writ before she left

in the geoglyphs wild boars beat through fields
of beans scrub pine & prairie grasses

in the long flares of the magnolia blossoms

blood moon sunk to its throat in the reservoir

the invisible vapor trail the Trinity leaves
as it follows the drought

secret alphabets dove wings scrawl on the air as they fall

though no one ever finishes saying goodbye
I leave the house of mourning with its shrouded mirrors

a little sad the world’s first evening without her in ninety-five years
is beautiful     this sudden rain out of nowhere in the midst

of evening sun     wet shine on streets & windshields   deadfall
& little torches of pearl millet

I’ll learn the signs one day
read the half-gutted skinned pig hung from a hook in a driveway

doe caught on the fence wires starred with black cow fur

somewhere it’s written that my daughter
would find my arms
would find her reflection in the mirror & run her fingers
along her own delighted gaze

(trails in the dust smaller than termite bores)

where is it written that one day
she will pull the sheet down upon my days

(my span of days between her hand

& her mirror hand) if I was born without a birthright

each body is the beginning of my native land

How Does a Man Become a Hashtag

 

is it the way air becomes hollow bones inside
doves lifting above a summer field

or the way the flares of mimosa blooms limn the current
of the Frio as it churns beyond the bend

(white stars fly out from a well-dark barrel)

is it like alchemy the way your hundred bones transform
into language     is it like pasture flames that sing down
beneath green blades

(gunpowder residue settles upon your skin
like pollen dusted on a wing)

is it the way dew rises from long grasses
or like fog above a river
or a little at a time like horse blood drawn
from a tick bite

(now lie down       now rest)

the way a loon is part of the lake when it dives into a dark
we’ve never dreamed
or how the cottonseed meshed within the feeder’s wire skeleton

is eaten by deer
& so jumps with the bodies

of these white-tailed ghosts who leap the trails
in front of us     half wind & half-rumor

(red & blue lights strobe across a neighborhood)

are you liminal as the body
who climbs the ladder we’ve left

at the fence that divides

one country from another

do you become a million points of orange-black light
like the migrating monarch butterflies

do you enter this hieroglyph the way language flowers
in my daughter

all twelve months of her   all hundred-something bones
all the world unsayable but for the sign enough

(now the crowd begins to gather)

which is two hands waving at collarbone level
those twin oars scarcely bigger than picks on a comb

if her hands drift any higher
she’s signing applause
at this world     at this evening the sudden squall     tiger lilies & purple thistle full throttle in each ditch & dive in this county
moon’s pale shrift upon canyon bones
& exposed white caliche stones

(now lie down         now rest)

rough as sand upon the hands that are saying no

she’s signing enough enough enough

They Ate the Bulbs of Tulips

 

I’d have to hear it spoken in mind somehow,
my father said, of the Frisian word for hunger,
but I’d settle for memory, or grief, under
the category of things that undo me. It’s a funny
thing to think. Who would be the speaker
if not him? His mother, maybe,
holding hands in the hospital with his father
after seventy-six years. Married the day after the war,
when the stores had no windows—the Nazis
took the glass. The mourning doves
might have the right vowels, or the red belly
in the leafless dogwood, now winging
through the sunlight peplummed through
the pines, blue tarp peeled back
on the cotton bales in the field beyond,
Merry Christmas spraypainted in blue
upon the white. Snowless, starless,
a man goes on trial in France for helping
refugees. Could’ve been your grandparents,
my father says, your Pake hid in barns, woke
once to mouse feet scrambling across his face,
but in France it was a two-year-old in a ditch,
dying of dehydration, & when I look down
I’ve pulled the petals from the bouquet,
& as I’ve neither French nor Frisian nor
courage, all I can do is sweep the body
of petals into my palms, & pour them into
the cathedral of water in front of me.

Prayer for This Day

 

Through scrub pine & river hickory trees
shafts of sunlight fall

sharp as a needle,

if the adrenaline’s the open page
on the table,
which says often and often, father, you would appear to me,
Your sad shade would appear . . .

no ghosts here, no, & if the Lord of hosts,
no answer to what we ask, bread, or wine,

or why—

though we’re listening, asking for a sign, a reply—

even a not yet—
& yet, there I was
three stairs down
when my daughter fell,
her body light as a sheaf

torn from the Book of Kells.

I don’t know that I’ve done anything better with my life.
I don’t know what I’d do without her.

Reach out your hand & put it in my side,

my Lord said to the doubter.

And wherever you are, put your hand here:

no one was shot in Dallas today.

There’s still water in the Trinity
forty days since last rain.

I hold up my student with the immigration hearing to you.
I hold up my daughter’s almost-asthmatic lungs.

Tomorrow is easy, Stevens says, today is difficult.
Tomorrow ain’t shit, Bubbles echoes,

somewhere on The Wire,

no shit, so guide us, Lord,
as we zig the streetside dumpsters & dealers
zag the halfway house,

zig the conspiracy theorist

who knows where all the witnesses
to JFK’s assassination disappeared to,

zag the stadiums alive in their hundred thousand watt wounds,
our towns desegregated for one night, just one,

so this must be a dream

or an act of God
(how will you bless us?
You said, I will use your poverty—

it’s writ plain. Your will be done,
despite all I can’t explain).

I hold up this breath. These hands to catch
falling bodies, hands to brush
away the stinging fire ant, open

the manual of this EpiPen.

Close your fist around the auto-injector.
Don’t close your eyes.

Late Sestet

“a single dog hair can split the wind . . .”

—Charles Wright

We see the shadow of the dog, never the dog itself,
my friend says.

Meaning the next life, maybe, that beautiful rumor,

meaning God

or gravity, maybe I’m listening for the whistle, Lord,

that will call me home,
a wind to still the wind
between my ribs,

where leaves are falling through gray skies . . .

Let It Shine on Me

 

sings a man who lived his last week
in a burned-out house,
who made his bed in the ashes,

& as he swings from faux-bass guttural of let your light

to a slow

clear lifted tenor shine with seven seconds left
I ask him how he slept that week,
just last night I spilled sleep meds
on my grandmother’s obit.

Why did the hospital close its doors to you,
in 1945, in Beaumont, Texas?
What does forty years of blindness
& dying of malaria
do to a faith that sang My Lord

He done just what he said—

heal the sick & raise the dead.

The needle skips to God Don’t Never Change
but I’ve always believed prayer moves Him,

it must.

I’ve always hoped for a God generous enough
to be wounded by this world,

by our segregated churches,

our segregated dead.

Sang & preached in the streets to strangers you couldn’t see.
But no healing here. No grave—
lost to the years. At the end, or just after

the end, how did you leave?
Just close your eyes.
Or did the air suddenly smell of rain
& myrrh, as someone led you by the hand

from the roofless

dwelling you made of defiance & cinders
through the streets of sleep

to a house with many rooms,
a vase full of Texas wildflowers,
little lighthouse,

shining in one?

Southern Tongues Coda (Precision Dying)

“ain’t no dark till something shines . . .”

—Townes Van Zandt

I don’t know what the dog stares at
as I wash the pus from his belly
(pissing blood a week, vet
can’t say why), body

still enough

to be pointing game,
(is this the soundless way

the next life will be bayed?)

or why he chews the early wind-scattered samaras

& long grass beside the drainage ditch
in which three deer in the last three months

have come down to die.

Sometimes I feel I’m privy
to just a verse or two from the animal gospels,
though ask just about anyone
working with the near-dead, the almost-gone,

they’ll tell you the will
or soul or just plain stubbornness
will keep a person here until they decide to let go.

Precision dying, you might call it.

On her last morning Mama held out
more than four hours,

time enough

to drive Virginia Beach to Raleigh.
I don’t know how to make you believe
no hydrangeas bloomed the year she died.

If there are more neurons in the brain than stars
in the Milky Way, where is the Star of Letting Go?

And what does its last light reach as it pulses out.

Some little planet, some field, empty
save a man who washes a dog

in an evening that was promised
to no one, in a twilight that did not invite us.
Soon, the dark river. And a moon like a salt lick half-tongued down, & still,

so many iridescent eyes.

This is what we do when we don’t know what to do,
when we have little

but lack or labor in the way of salve.

Wash the body. Say something.

Texas Blues II

 

And God said, let there be tinder
& an August Texas was sparked from flint & stone,

dry as a hog’s tongue

two weeks dead, sunstruck thistle & bloomless
blackfoot daisy & fleabane,
chickweed & burweed

a deadfall mist

a quarter-inch above every field, empty spillway a snakeskin
curling through town,

empty as God’s throat.

But this may have been the hour impressionism or baby CPR
was discovered, or the hour our names were written in water

by the lead letters sunk in the Thames a hundred years ago,
or the hour a country was founded—
one that consists of all the No Man’s Lands in the world,

every foot

of space between borders.
If I were its creator, I’d start here, with innumerable fields
divvied up with barbed wire, empty
but for oil derricks & longhorns, frack well scaffolding

rising from the scrub,

thin as the ribs of the dead.
Let there be tinder, & there was—
what we did with the hollows between us,
light or heat in a drought-struck heatspell
out of nothing

but a tangle of limbs,

which is all I’ve ever wanted

out of life, or Texas, all I hoped for
until this bobblehead baby showed up,

who flails like a spider monkey
when she’s been too long without sleep,

baby with a cry that cuts through plaster

& bone, like Chewbacca on a kazoo.
And for song we’ve a toilet that howls like a kettle

after the flush: maybe we’ll never hear the mermaids singing
but listen, the gators of Lake Lewisville are whistling

right up through the pipes of this tumbledown shack,

over the echoes

of the train horn, last bell, last call in a few hours.

Let’s keep an eye on the life
in our hands, & one on the dream country of the future,

that train we’ve never seen,

on this sickle moon’s glint, knuckle
of one of the hands bearing the dark litter westward.

Stray Paragraphs from the Year of the Rooster

Denton, Texas

When the evening light’s pale as a butcher

with his mouth sewn closed,

half-moon a bone borne aloft
on a bier of thistle,

the last of the commuters begin to head home on the Texas superhighways—

hell’s half acre

if we’re going by heat,

& if the other half’s
our regrets & unkept promises—

home to the suburbs, thinking on the past—
their heads fixed backward,
as if it’s the eighth circle
of the underworld,

the one with the fortune-tellers, diviners,
the ones who couldn’t see it coming.

Did they see a woman returning yesterday

to the slave cabin she was born in,

eighty-seven years in between these two days?
Or Charlie Murphy tweeting release the past to rest
as deeply as possible

the night before he died?

One to sleep on, it began. Another one
to sleep on—

the ashes of Bob Probert sprinkled in the penalty box
at the Joe, before they tore it down.
He fought with a grinning heart

& a right hand like a hammer, never mind

the feather, the heart will be weighed against
what we turned away from,

who we couldn’t face.

There’s a black cat fix for every frack well,
someone said
before we voted on drilling this town,

but there’s none for remorse,

only long grass on the grave of the shooters,
the famous ones,

the ones who hit the Indians from a mile out,

long grass & a high noon,
so it’s about the time
Christ forgave the penitent thief—

so maybe there is a fix.
Or maybe eternity’s a rain-wrapped angel come down
to tell you there’s no eternity. Sometimes

he’s selling oranges

on the freeway onramp for a dollar.
A buck, then the otherworldly scent, citrus
or myrrh. After hunger, & the world, & the self itself,

the last renunciation is the smallest,
smaller than a snakebite.

And the door to heaven is even smaller,
if you can find it,

locked except to the touch,

& if you do, remember me.

And the moon, from Jordan
to Jerusalem, clear as chrism oil

half a second after the blessing,

the moon sets even in hell,
even here, one to sleep on,

with nothing but new blooms
for company, new blooms &
a little rain out of nowhere, just now,
empty streets & the company of heaven.

Letteromancy (The New Causality)

divination by cast letters

And the mile the wildfire ember travels on the wind.

And the mile of blood tides through the capillaries & arteries

of my daughter’s body,

& the empty towns that wait for faces in each
of the chambers of her heart.

And the mile in that last inch between the end of me

& the hem of His garment, good Lord,

may as well be a thousand here on Mile 627,
hwy 20—a little east of Carthage in west Louisiana—
a black stripe through fifty acres of head high afterfire shrub

punctuated by a handful of bonepale trees,
three- & four-story antler-bare survivors.

My daughter’s asleep in the childseat, as the headlights winnow
the road from the dark, like the twin beams of light

in the Double Slit Experiment, which showed that future measurements
somehow affected the state of the photons in the past,

as they were setting out. So when I lean back & twist to press
the back of my hand to her forehead

& see the shadow letters UNIVERSITY cast by the rear window sticker
against the moonlight,

it’s her degree I’m seeing some twenty years later, her marriage
& the faces of her kids luminous between the letters.

What future events & coming lives have left their prints on this instant,
this one instant? I’ve turned for just a moment

& yet by the time I turn back

from the rest of her life

this present moment runs like water through my hands.

A man has walked out of Angola prison after forty years.
Ornette Coleman dies. Twenty thousand stars drift out of the reach
of our telescopes, if the math on the expanding universe holds,

this stripe of road blazes west

& the fever in her body sets fire to Carthage two thousand years ago.

Aubade with Horses (Fort Worth Impromptu II)

 

There’s no right word for the color of the ashes,

you said, at the New Orleans hospice—
every week a new urn carried out
& poured into the nameless garden.

Maybe it’s true. And maybe,
just there through the fog,
this morning’s mare & her foal,

gray-dappled & steaming,

comes close enough.
Or the grime-dulled silver of the quarter you were given once
to dig a horse grave—
a piano’s worth of handthrown earth,
when you were young, first of many.

A quail flailing skyward might come close,
or the color of an unanswered prayer, or the first mouthful of gob,
sucked & spat out from the rattlesnake bite
before the blood hits.

And if the horses are the ashes, this sundog’s

the transfiguration,

southeast of the sun, toward Nacogdoches,
dragonfly glimmer that Sherwin-Williams might call
skin-at-the-soprano’s throat, if she’s under the bright lights,
if her last aria is on our forgetting,
& how the language fails us, as it so often does.

O cloud of flesh, o dream
of rain out of cloudless skies,

we begin to be erased

when we lose the graves,
when we lose the tongues.

Someday we’ll know how to mend the horse’s bones
without driving her mad.

Someday we’ll come to the green pastures,
where we’ll be poured out, & the lost vowels

will fall back to our tongues like snow.