Handiwork
The figure of the woman in the garden,
the brightly colored fruit poised at her lips,
is not archetypal--she is a friend of mine.
Granted, she has known some good, some evil,
but she has come by such knowledge honestly.
She has met me here to help
build a barn. All morning
we have been raising beams, supports,
until now, near noon, we lie
in the long grass looking
at the wood skeleton, all done
but for a couple of ribs.
We drowse for a spell
and after awhile begin again.
It's hard work--sweat
sheets our foreheads, arms.
We move surely, methodically, knowing
what comes next. Across the river
our echoing hammers build nothing.
Hours pass.
Suddenly, from deep in the canebrake,
something thrashes, cries,
struggles into the air,
then falls, breaking
into our rhythm of work.
It is a young quail, not able
to fly. My friend puts down her hammer
and gathers the bird into her hands.
Quietly, evening rises about us,
breathing out from plants,
from soil and water.
Now and again the quail peeps.
From the slick leaf mold at our feet
a cricket rasps
its dark counterpoint.
Aging Gracefully
We are men, in our late thirties,
and we have set the neighbor's roof afire.
"Flaming Balls," the packages read,
crude lettering provocatively purpling
the flimsy cardboard, shrink-wrapped and
innocently lying in their silver-dusty bin
at Big Ed's State Line Fireworks Supermarket,
Chattanooga, TN. The inscrutable logo
should have warned but didn't: A lone rocket
atop a pair of cherry bombs.
Now, in this sultry suburb of the city
Sherman burned, the last gleam of twilight
fading in the west, to the fevered delight
of our attendant offspring we have
lit the fuse, and we have run away.
Independence flowers overhead, reflected
in our wistful eyes. Seconds later,
a woman's voice calls from the porch, "I see
something over there. A light. There."
We turn as one, and there--There!--
the loose shag of dry pine needles littering
the neighbor's roof erupts in fiery cascade.
In the acrid dark we clamber over chain-link
as tall as a man--slip, rip, howl and we are in.
Someone is pulling a bucking, sputtering hose
through a chain-link diamond, and in my stomach
beer loses ground to flaming Hot Wings, the inner
world mirroring the outer. Through mist and smoke
and lurid flame dimly I see three figures
on the roof, stomping out flames, sweating,
bent double. Some herky-jerky Outback ritual
dance unfolds, complete with rhythmic chant--
Anybody home? Oh, Anybody home!--and I think
I must be dreaming.
Stillness. Startled silence.
Then bodies, damp and smudged, slide from the roof.
Show's over. Nobody's home. Wind in the empty garden
hose moans like a didgeridoo.
The fire truck slunk back to the station.
The Sheriff let us off with a warning.
The neighbors came home drunk and didn't notice.
The women put the children to bed and talked
low on the porch, long into the night. We knew
to stay away. Sometime later on a breath of wind
came the chuckled whisper--"Flaming Balls!"
You
You are the pronoun of my dreams.
You are what listens
when, in all honesty confessing
my powerlessness in this world,
all I can do is call, and you
are what I call.
You are the foil of language,
sigil of the contrary,
anathema of echo. You are
the waiting lifeboat
disappearing into fog.
You are the only thing between.
You are what waits
in delirious anticipation
for my tongue to enter
and always I press
toward the mark
of your high calling.
In spite of my teachers
you are the stubborn one
whose nerves are the abacus wires
upon which move the beads
of my particular pain, each word
a calculus of desire.
In this desert, this aridity
of self, you are the spider
that sorts and strings the pearls of dew.
The Land Under the Lake
I think of Noah, his family spared,
Riding that bark of gopher wood above
The good lands of home, now submarine, paired
Beasts below waiting for news of the dove.
Less sublime than God's wondrous instruction,
The voice of the Washington bureaucrat
Told of the Dale Hollow Dam's construction--
Good farms, long held, flooded in nothing flat.
One summer on a houseboat we drifted
Over barns and churches, cornfields and cribs,
Swam down, down, to where gauzy light sifted
Like silt through some barn's or house's ribs.
Marriage is an ark, with children safe below,
And love is the land lying under the lake.
In the little drowned chapel years ago
My mother and father slice their wedding cake.
John Lee Hooker
Boom Boom Boom Boom! John Lee Hooker's in town,
And Memphis holds its breath as the Kingsnake stomps
To splinters the rickety stage. The swamps
Beyond the bridge tremble. New Madrid slides down.
His voice, a raw, raucous rumble we drown
In, swoops, slides, simmers, soothes, and Hooker chomps
His pipestem, leans into the story and whomps
His Gibson a lick or two in G. A frown
Creases the cracked leather of his fine face
And his dark glasses fog. Ancient as the river
Two blocks over, he conjures devil weather--
The great flood of Tupelo--and to that place,
And us, listening, declares "I won't ever
Forget it, and I know you won't either."
The Life You've Led
falls away, piece by piece,
like the yellow leaves of aspen,
like scales from the blind man's eyes.
When the aspen's leaves have all fallen
we say it is bare--
might better say naked.
When the scales fall
from the blind man's eyes
we say it is a miracle,
but he is clumsy and afraid.
It is October, and yellow leaves
are falling everywhere.
I see your stark symmetry,
concealing green buds.
You see my amazed eyes.
Learning How to Live
I'm a starving man
in a large woolen coat
in summertime.
I'm not cold,
I'm hungry.