by Thomas Lux
a letter that cannot be unwritten.
It falls on the top of a pile of other such letters
in their white dresses
in the dark – that man has called it in.
There is a sound of tiny roots being torn,
and a water spider, skating smoothly over the Zone’s flat surface, sinks.
The Poison Shirt
You put it on to walk the bright day, dumb
to the little skull-
and-crossbones
buttons, dumb to pulmonary numbing, half-hazy eye, rubber
ankles, not
noticing the sound
of people slumping – shhump – to the sidewalk
three seconds
after you pass. Each moment slimmer than nil – so the day passes, too,
with its trail of the poisoned
that ends with the you
in the poison shirt.
A Bird, Whose Wingtips Were on Fire,
led the small boy, lost in the forest at night,
to the clearing’s edge
where the search teams
were gathering to look for him.
He ran to his weeping mother and father,
who raised him in their arms,
and all gathered around in great joy – the neighbours,
the cops, soldiers,
sailors, field hands, bloodhounds,
the high school marching band, all
circled the boy in great joy until
he talked of the bird
that came to him as he sat shivering
beside a moss-graced boulder,
second night lost
in the woods. No one wanted to hear that,
even in their relief
no one wanted to believe
a bird with flaming wingtips
lit a path
and led the boy on it to safety. Better
that it was dumb luck or, as many murmur,
the will of a being
with a short one-syllable name.
What colour was the bird? Did it speak to you?,
they asked the boy. Grey-brown, said the boy,
and no, it didn’t speak, birds
don’t talk. Were you playing with matches,
and did you set a bird on fire
which then flew away,
and you followed?, they asked the boy.
No matches, no hunger,
the boy said, and the only things that scared me
were the orchids and a fawn.
Slimehead (Hoplostethus atlanticus)
Humans eat first with their ears, so
to sell this deep-sea fish
we give some poetry to its name: orange roughy.
Oh tasty, despite its mucus-exuding head – that’s gone
long before your dinner plate. A mild meat,
firm, low fat,
fished a mile beneath the waves.
Slow-growing, long-lived: up to 150 years.
In the lightless depths
it’s brown, not orange. When you pull it up
each blood vessel bursts,
in its version of the bends?
I ate it, twice.
I’ll eat it again
when it’s over being overfished, if so.
But rather than its flanks
sautéed in this or that,
I’d like to roll inside a shoal
of them, down there where nobody goes,
to know what they know,
to not know what I know,
down there with the hoki, hake,
rattail, oreo dory, my dear slimeheads
and their countrymen,
the shy, prolific squid.
Salve
Paint me with it,
he tells the nurse,
and calls, too, for balm,
ointment, slather it all
(and add some tincture) on him.
In the soft moth powder of it
swathe him, swathe him, on white sheets,
in a white room. Some unguent
on his clavicle, please, nurse,
and on each ventricle lotion would be good.
To each temple: assuagement.
To the bony comers of his eye sockets, your fingers,
nurse, to press there anodynes.
Pour a river (with rivulets)
of emollients from his nape
down his spine’s valley – let a pool
fill there, a shallow pond
of salve, let it gather there,
then place a tiny boat
upon its eastern shore, nurse,
and launch it westward, gently, with your thumb.
Regarding (Most) Songs
Whatever is too stupid to say can be sung.
JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719)
The human voice can sing a vowel to break your heart.
It trills a string of banal words,
but your blood jumps, regardless. You don’t care
about the words but only how they’re sung
and the music behind – the brass, the drums.
Oh the primal, necessary drums
behind the words so dumb!
That power, the bang and the boom and again the bang
we cannot, need not, live without,
nor without other means to make that sweet noise,
the guitar or violin, the things that sing
the plaintive, joyful sounds.
Which is why I like songs best
when I can’t hear the words, or, better still,
when there are no words at all.
A Library of Skulls
Shelves and stacks and shelves of skulls, a Dewey
decimal number inked on each unfurrowed forehead.
Here’s a skull
who, before he lost his fleshy parts
and lower bones, once
walked beside a river (we’re in the poetry section
now), his head full of love
and loneliness; and this smaller skull,
in the sociology stacks, smiling (they’re all
smiling) – it’s been empty
a hundred years. That slot
across another’s temple? An axe blow
that fractured
her here. Look at this one from the children’s shelves,
a baby, his fontanel
a screaming mouth and this time no teeth, no smile.
Here are a few (history): a murderer,
and this one – see how close their eye sockets! – a thief,
and here’s a rack of torturers’ skulls
beneath which a longer, much longer, row of the tortured.
And look: generals’ row,
their epaulets
on the shelves to each side of them.
Shelves and shelves, stacks stacked on top of stacks,
floor above floor,
this towering high-rise library
of skulls, not another bone in the place,
and just now the squeak of a wheel
on a cart piled high with skulls
on their way back to shelves,
while in the next aisle
a cart is filling with those about to be loaned
to the tall, broken-hearted man waiting
at the desk, his library card
face down before him.
The Fish-Strewn Fields
After the river rose above its banks, after the farms
and fields and yards
were drowned and drained again, all
was fish-strewn, stump- and root-strewn,
besotted. Here and there,
pieces of an upriver town – light blue ice tray,
birdhouse, the town clerk – all litter the pastures.
Aerial photos (all is mud now, no water for boats,
no ground to walk on) show
us this, the helicopter dropping close
to look for anything alive.
The town clerk’
s blue shirt blooms.
He drank deep of the waters and mud.
The river recedes now, back between,
then below its banks,
and recedes still more, drains to the stones,
then through the bedrock beneath its sand, oh, it sinks,
the river, it’s gone,
and then the banks close like the lips of a wound,
leaving a wormy scar
along the bottom of our valley
for miles, miles.
Unlike, for Example, the Sound of a Riptooth Saw
gnawing through a shinbone, a high howl
inside of which a bloody, slashed-by-growls note
is heard, unlike that
sound, and instead, its opposite: a barely sounded
sound (put your nuclear ears
on for it, your giant hearing horn, its cornucopia mouth
wide) – a slippery whoosh of rain
sliding down a mirror
leaned against a windfallen tree stump, the sound
a child’s head makes
falling against his mother’s breast,
or the sound, from a mile away, as the town undertaker
lets Grammy’s wrist
slip from his grip
and fall to the shiny table. And, if you turn
your head just right
and open all your ears,
you might hear
this finest sound, this lost sound: a plough’s silvery prow
cleaving the earth (your finger
dragging through milk, a razor
cutting silk) like a clipper ship cuts the sea.
If you do hear this sound,
then follow it with your ear and also your eye
as it and the tractor that pulls it
disappear over a hill
until it is no sound at all,
until it comes back over the hill again,
again dragging its furrow,
its ground-rhythm, its wide open throat, behind it.
Cordon Sanitaire
The blanch place, pale, like under a bandage,
a creamy strip of peace
quarantined between cannons like bristles,
like combs’ teeth
aligned across from each other. It’s balmy here
in Cordon Sanitaire, the general wrote
on a postcard, sitting on the veranda
of the Cordon Sanitaire Hotel and Spa. All’s neutral,
a very light wind-worn tan
the one colour. The back door
of a cannon, the one that swings open
so that a man can insert
a large large shell – Did I,
he thought, did I just hear one
swing open? I ate the veal
last night, mashed potatoes, some florets
of cauliflower. He didn’t mention,
or else an editor struck it from the text,
the black smoke
flowing from the high stacks on low buildings;
he didn’t mention
the little song he sang: ‘Leprosaria, Crematoria,
Adiosia, in Memoria.’
His secretary, who was there,
his last unmarried daughter, there also,
said he didn’t actually sing
but made its rhythms seem ‘liturgical’.
He’d even ‘bounce a little’ in his chair,
his daughter said,
until the sky turned to lead, she said, until
the sky turned to lead.
The Language Animal
Because he can speak, because he can use his words, a whole headful
of them, he gives everything
names, even things that call themselves,
forever, something else.
Because he can speak he can efficiently lie,
or obscure with such brilliance
a listener with less language
is glad to lose more of it.
Because he can speak
he will be lonely
because those who speak back speak another language
of other derivations.
Because he can speak he speaks.
Because he can speak he can pray out loud.
Because he can speak the predators are drawn to him in the night.
Because he can speak
he invented the ear, then two, to better hear himself speak.
Because he can speak he thought he could sing.
Because he can speak
he has one more thing to do
besides searching for food,
or hiding so as not to be food.
Because he can speak he draws a full breath
and speaks,
in sentences, each one beginning with a large letter
and ending with a period,
or the soon-to-be-invented marks
that indicate bewilderment and awe.
Pencil Box Shaped Like a Gun
You brought to school that fall
the pistol-shaped pencil box, .45-
calibre-inspired but larger, swollen, loaded
with pens, six-inch ruler, the compass tool – the one
with which you got to stab the paper
and make the stubby pencil
strapped to its other leg move around in a perfect circle.
Also an eraser,
like the rubber hammer
the doctor plunked your knee with
once or twice a year. Blue, a see-through
plastic pencil box atop
the scarred (your uncle Larry’s name dug deep) desk,
strata after strata of shellac.… The classroom’s large
light-filled windows bright,
and Linda Miller’s voice
rasps over a speaker, a box with dials, connected
by wire to where she lives,
two or three miles away, over a small river,
halfway up the long grade
of some stubby, stony hills.
Linda’s ill, very ill.
We strain to hear
her voice. The teacher talks to the box,
to Linda, whom we hear brokenly
this autumn
of bright skies,
of hay stacked to the rafters,
of swollen pumpkins and gourds,
and of the last cabbages waiting,
any day now, stripped of their
outer leaves, to become part of
a tasty soup.
The Corner of Paris and Porter
Meet me there, you remember, the corner
of Paris and Porter. We stood on that spot
after walking our city all day,
dropped-off-the-earth lost in each other.
We’d live in the house there, we said,
we loved the sway-back porch, the elms
in the yard towering. We stopped
in the thick, still shade of one,
the sidewalk raised and cracked by its roots.
On the curb: a mailbox, agape, flag up,
a dry birdbath in the yard,
and in the driveway a yellow car: this was lucky,
a yellow car, a child once told me.
The sunlight a wall slamming down
outside the shade’s circle. Two old sisters, we guessed,
lived there: two
lace antimacassars
on two wicker porch chairs.
We’d knock on the door,
tell them we love their house,
which they’d then bequeath to us,
on the corner, the house
we found by chance, chirps and childcalls,
the clanking of lunch dishes,
though we saw not one child or bird.
The mailman (we never saw him but knew his name
was Steve) would leave great piles
of letters, the grocery
and the garden would provide.
It was the corner
; of Paris and Porter,
in that part of the city
where we’d never walked before – it was south
and farther south, past downtown,
beyond the meat district, the fish market,
past the street of clocks, the tripe stalls,
the brick kilns, the casket factories; we turned
east, a few blocks north,
there was nothing but warehouses
and long blocks of lots,
tall fences topped by barbed wire, behind which
what? We walked over a bridge
(the train tracks beneath were thick with weeds)
and there it was: a neighbourhood – houses,
yards, shrubs, we were talking and talking,
I don’t know how many miles, lost
in each the other,
and though we did not know where we were,
we knew where we were going: the corner
of Paris and Porter, remember, the day was blue
and clear, I recall the exact path of an ant,
the mica glinting in the kerbstone, a curtain
parting momentarily at your laugh.
I could have drowned in your hair.
Meet me there,
today, don’t be late, on the corner
of Paris and Porter.
The Bandage Factory
Our bandage factory’s busy: boxcar after boxcar
of gauze-only trains
empty at the east side unloading dock.
The women wash and fold and sterilise.
The men make the big looms boom
in the bandage room.
And the boys and girls (when we’re busy
no one goes to school) stack
and sweep and gather scraps
that we ship downstate
to the babies’ and children’s bandage works.
On the west side loading dock
at five o’clock,
when we’ve filled a whole train,
we like to stand there
while it pulls away
(some of the children wave)
and watch our bandages go
out into the world
where the wounds reside,
which they were made to dress.
FROM
The Cradle Place