TO A BEETLE DEAD ON ITS BACK
Dear drone,
the tragically poor design
that has tripped you up and overthrown
all hope
wasn't your humped shape
so much as your crazy legs, your nonstop
panicked
retreat. This pavement's cracked;
you should have been more circumspect.
--I saw
a furious kung-fu
hero once on the late show
knocked flat,
and he regained his feet
in one convulsion by kicking them out
at the sky,
and the Ming Dynasty
was saved to fall another day.
Ming,
"luminous": all night long
the blue screen metamorphosing;
tokes;
the chocolate snack cakes;
the wrappers stuffed back into the box.
Somewhere
toward dawn, in the tenth year,
I stumbled upward from the chair.
Out
here under the streetlight,
I gaze down like an astronaut
at a leaf,
and a crushed peanut half;
at a bead of tar, glistening as if
I were
some kind of connoisseur,
and saw things as they really are.
EXHORTATION TO POLITICAL INVERTEBRATES
My friends, we'll each receive a special steel
prosthesis, and walk upright! We'll erase
this stupefying cuticle, and feel!
Our fluids will move through us like a kiss,
like a soft light inside our nakedness,
where nothing was but excrement and terror,
made worse by the nice doctors. --Was that us,
that bad child making faces in a mirror,
earning his execution with error upon error?
Let execution come then! Let our necks
like gelatin be severed, quiveringly!
--and then be whole again, as the cool axe
glides through like moonlight slicing through the eye
of a blind man--and so we shall not die!
Exultingly, as I myself became
your prophesying Baptist, we shall know
each other's faces, friends, and beyond them
a landscape, and a sky! I see I'm out of time.
NONE OTHER
Matthew 27.50, 51
What can still bleed is not yet food.
In the ninth hour Jesus howled
and his wounds' crusts were opened. Blood
repainted its dried trails. He felt
the scourge's language on his back
burn for interpretation, final
insight, some empathic look
into the memoirs of the Cruel,
the Other. But none came. His face
dilated, he seemed about to laugh,
then cried again with a loud voice.
The long veil ripped itself in half.
"SECRET OF CHRISTIANITY REVEALED!"
And God said, Let the bedsprings chime
under productive grunting spouses,
let pleasure smear the bedroom air
with its unbounded vowel and low
aroma of old anchovies!
Let lovers' sheets be white kinetic
sculpture of rump and elbow, Oh
they're doing it right now! said God,
looking down at the newly naked
apple cores in the garden trash.
He swooned, and fell down into flesh.
AT YOUR HANGING
The hangman weeps. He kneels and begs
forgiveness of your shoes. OK,
OK, you nod, and your headbag's
spice, its tropical jute bouquet,
grows subtler, like some wine you are
adrift in. This the hangman frantically
understands, and everyone here,
in sunlight and authentically
ash-blackened sackcloth, deeply feels.
Now we lay us down to dream
those cold colorful subsoils
your face must crumble and become,
and now the hangman's drying his eyes
on the soft rag of the noose.
KNIFE
And now, the facts
about my pocket knife.
Factus, the Latin past
participle, a thing done
in the Arena, say:
Spartacus went over the top,
looking like Kirk Douglas.
Between his gleaming teeth
he clenched the gladius,
the short thruster and slasher
Rome gave him leave to fall on, later.
But he refused: I saw it all,
and see it now: half-closed, my knife's
a dwarf's entrenching tool--or else
a shiny-billed, small toucan,
Ramphastos discolorus,
of whom the sweaty conquistadores
executed not a few,
on account of its loud and
mocking call.
GIRL SPINNER IN CAROLINA COTTON MILL, 1910
after Lewis Hine
Maybe her crossed black-and-white eyes
wept, as each acceleration
of the immense cotton
lyre deafened her. Maybe the voice
and face of Jesus comforted
her breathing, in the mill's fire-
inhibiting drenched air. What's clear
is this: dazed, grateful, she stood
one day at the picket gate, just there,
smiling widely, moon-
white face facing the Kodak. Hine
wrote down no name for her.
for Ethel Brinson Fordham, 1895-1972
THE BURYING GROUND
One evening early
in February,
at Vine Swamp,
North Carolina,
near the graves
I had driven there
to look for,
I put my eye
to a bullet hole
in a stop sign.
--And there was the moon,
in a ring of space
in a ring of rust.
It was like touching
my eyebrow
to an eyebrow,
or trying to,
long ago.
Like tiptoeing up
to a keyhole,
and kneeling down
and being seen
all the way
to the back of the skull,
feeling my name
carved there.
New Poems
ODE
Urn, your bronze lid
never opens.
--But seems to try to;
rears a knob
like a big sore thumb,
hitching a ride.
Like a deep sea polyp,
high and dry
and hollowed out
by the sunlight
in which you stand,
corroded green,
at square-shouldered
and potbellied
attention, empty,
tightened down
on your round foot
like a suction cup.
Or not quite empty.
Maybe a gallon
of not quite pure
Victorian air
went dark in there.
An odor, an odd
molecule
of manure, tobacco,
tuberculosis,
whatever the world
was breathing into
the foundry man
himself just then,
as he finished his weld,
trimmed back his flame
and moved on,
leaving you,
his iron lung.
(Salamander v.12:no.2, 2007)
RECESS
Out on the sunlit dust our games
had trampled hard, we teemed, we bloomed
like microbes sprung from hell
or fallen from heaven
all over each other,
all chickenfight and face-slap tag
and loose-mouthed splattering sounds, until
Bob Hamlin stopped the dirt clod.
Or rock, was it. Against his temple
I heard it snick,
and he gave a little
moan, and bowed deeply,
saving his back-to-school clothes
from an ooze
that suddenly hung there,
plumb and red in the morning air,
like a tether winding shorter,
drawing him downward into a figure
perfectly rectangular:
blood, ground, and broken boy.
(Rhino 2007)
EPILOGUES
for Giula Dupree
1 Her Floor
A finishing nail
has raised its head
up out of the wood,
and gone all
human and sad.
A tiny blank expression,
catching the sun,
like a matchhead
scraping against my giant shoe.
As if to burn it down.
As if the old woman
had known what to do.
2 Salvage Yard
This is the way she slumped and died,
on the vinyl seat, on Litchfield Road,
hit by a truck on the driver's side,
at forty-five through the red light.
This is the son who wasn't there,
was not and never had been there,
and did not kill her, is that clear?
Nor turn the wheel to save her.
(Southern Poetry Review v.45:no.1, 2007)
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