by Mary Karr
to the faces of those you were sent to love.
I once sat with Franz in the day room
of his first loony bin near Christmas—
his face swollen from drink, his glasses
broken so a Band-Aid taped one wing on.
We smoked near a piano where a stick man
with wobbly eye pencil and graying hair
like mine now played Someone to Watch Over Me
while we wondered who might be dumb enough
to print our books or read them or
give us jobs, which happened, which failed
to soothe us more than sitting on that orange
plastic couch in shared dread. Lights blinking.
The ward nurse saying the boxes under the tree
were decorative only: they sat unopened every year.
Look at us passing my last smoke back and forth,
unable to guess we’d ever be anywhere
else, thick snow coming down and piling up,
sawhorses blocking all the small roads.
Exurbia
In the predawn murk when the porch lights hang
on suburban porches like soft lemons
my love rides out in his black car.
His high beams stroke our bedroom wall.
Half awake, I feel watched over and doze
afloat in swirls of white linen.
Then he’s at the Y in trunks I bought him
sleek as an otter, eyes open behind goggles.
He claws the length of his lane.
Oh but his flip turn makes of his body
a spear, and his good heart drubs.
We often call at odd hours from different
star points of the globe. But today
he’ll stop home to deposit a hot coffee
on my bedside. For years I fought
moving to this rich gulag because I thought
it was too white or too right or too dumb, but
really, as Blake once said,
I couldn’t bear the beams of love.
Lord, I Was Faithless
I murdered you early, Father
My disbelief was an ice pick plunged
In mine own third eye
Like damned Oedipus
Whose sight could not stand
What his hand had done
And I—whose chief grumble
Was my kidhood (whose torments
Did fill many profitable volumes)
Refused your pedigree
I revised myself into a bastard
Orphan rather than serve
Like a poppet at your caprice
One among many numbered
To live size extra small
Whole years I lost in the kingdom
Of mine own skull
With my scepter the remote
I sat enthroned in a La-Z-Boy
Watching dramas I controlled
Only the volume on
I was a poor death’s head then
In my hook-rug empire
With snowflakes of paper
My favorite button is power
Suicide’s Note: An Annual
I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus
though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown
between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters
and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose
that I couldn’t
today name the gods
you at the end worshiped, if any, praise being
impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my Church who’d
roast in Hell poor suffering
bastards like you, unable to bear the masks
of their own faces. With words you sought to shape
a world alternate to the one that dared
inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you
could not, could never
fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn
your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen
you inherited. More than once you asked
that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera
I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest
my belief in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your
death feel like failure to everybody who ever
loved you as if our collective CPR stopped
too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse
punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction
that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason
I am not God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.
I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite
your best efforts you are every second
alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in,
each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.
We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.
The Awakening
(after Milosz)
After decades of suffering the torments
Of mine own mind, I awoke one dawn
Breathing into the odd center of this
Once-orphaned flesh. Alive, blinking.
The edges of self neatly conscribed
By skin as by a cop’s chalk outline.
My eyes rested on the actual surface
Of things. Nothing beamed from
My brain outward through the black
And spiral pinholes of mine eyes.
Nothing in me winced. This baffling
Stillness found me strapped in
The belly of a plane nosing west
Through blue air. I pinched my wristwatch
By its golden stem and pulled it out
And unwound its hands to undo
Whole hours, I could not not
Occupy my seat, could not wander
From the column of breath running up
The middle of me like rich sap of pine.
That inward root of air had ferried
The spirit of the Great Sustainer in
And out of nothingness all my miserable
Days and only in that instant did I feel
I am it. Wanting nothing, I failed
To fail at not having. How long
Did this stillness hold? The flesh went on
Ignorantly decaying. Then some baby’s open
Drooling face popped above the forward seat
And I grasped in pity at it, which dropped me
In familiar agony again with want
That sweet black ribbon around mine throat.
How God Speaks
Not with face slap or body slam
Rarely with lightning bolt or thunderclap
But in sighs and inclinations leanings
The way a baby suckles breath
The green current of the hazel wand
Curves toward the underground spring
The man in cashmere flesh does arrive
Holding out his arms he is wide
As any horizon I’ve ever traversed desert for
He brings thread count to my bed
Fire to my ovenWith a towel tucked
In his jeans he soaps my hair
Then finger combs it dry
I massage a knot from his neck
His mouth is well water
His gaze true and from
His tongue he brings the blessed Word
Face Down
What are you doing on this side of the dark?
You chose that side, and those you left
feel your image across their sleeping lids
as a blinding atomic blast.
Last we knew,
you were suspended midair
like an angel for a pageant off the room
where your wife slept. She had
to cut you down who’d been (I heard)
so long holding you up
. We all tried to,
faced with your need, which we somehow
understood and felt for and took
into our veins like smack. And you
must be lured by that old pain smoldering
like wood smoke across the death boundary.
Prowl here, I guess, if you have to bother somebody.
Or, better yet, go bother God, who shaped
that form you despised from common clay.
That light you swam so hard away from
still burns, like a star over a desert or atop
a tree in a living room where a son’s photos
have been laid face down for the holiday.
The Child Abuse Tour
We traveled into the lost time
up the undulating hills
pine forests red clay earth
I smelled being born
in streaming wood smoke
the hairpin turns
the hard truth of dirt yards
raked clean of any
grass blade swept watched over
by bird dogs brindled
and ghost gray and copper
alert to every leaf flicker
Then Cousin Peggy stood over
the wooden bowl
her lean fencepost frame
a repository of cruel
leukemia and a bone echo
of Aunt Gladys
whose battered tin sifter did transform
common cake flour into dust
powder finer than cocaine the sheen
the rasp of the stiff hinge forcing
through the sifter’s screen pale and
paler moonlight into smaller
particles the wooden bowl came from
Tennessee some seven
generations back tied in a croaker sack
to an ox’s ass bouncingWe knew
Peggy was dying and had journeyed out
of our metropoli across desert
and frosted tundra a fur piece to watch
her dead mother’s hands
pinch the dumplings into chicken
broth molten gold
The Less Holy Bible
Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
—Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
I. Genesis: Animal Planet
I rose up first in a big vacant state with an x in its middle
to mark the place I was born into dying
surrounded by oil refinery towers with flames
like giant birthday candles you could never
get big enough to blow out. Before I was
they were, and before them, reptiles and mammals
died and rotted and were crushed into carbon
then coal, then oil in the earth
whose deep core held bigger burning.
My daddy labored here, at The Gulf,
Which meant oil refinery, but also
a distance he drowned in,
caged inside this high hurricane fence.
In steel-toed boots for forty-two years, he walked.
The gold hatpin he got at retirement
had four diamond chips
for a smile and two rubies like eyes,
and he passed it to me
because it was a holy relic
of suffering and sacrifice,
so I wanted it most.
He breathed in this chemical stink
some days sixteen hours or days on end
in a storm, and it perfumed his overalls.
The catalyst he pumped on the cracking unit
burst through with enormous pressure to break down
the black crude’s chemical bonds
into layers, into products,
and many ignorant men did twist the spigots
and unplug the clogs and keep it all
rivering so the buried pipes
could carry out so many flammables north—
North! Where books are written and read.
The sunset down here glows green and hard-washed
denim blue and the scalded pink of flesh.
II. Numbers: Poison Profundis
Row out in the bayou with a shovel.
Take a pistol case you cross a snake.
Some places they’ve dumped stuff.
Sink a shovel in mud a few inches
and comes seeping up
some liquid stench right out
of the earth bubbling
acid green . . . like they took needles
or serpent’s fangs and injected
the very ground with it.
They dumped it here off trucks
or buried it deep in barrels the stuff ate through.
The devil has his own cauldron
and this goop glows green as any girl’s
magic clay she keeps on her nightstand.
We live on a scab, that’s what I’m saying.
How much is that worth? Not spit, not the blood of those
boys dead now my brothers so young, Lord, wing them
away from this shithole.
III. Leviticus: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
No one had to announce it was deadly
more than a moccasin bite.
The dumbest guy here (picked from stiff competition)
knew he’d be extinguished soon, polluted.
The oil barons too smart to live here would
as soon snuff us out as look at us—
our spongy tumors, the scarlet growth
on the bird dog’s belly, the fistula
in the breast, the bowels, the hanging balls,
basal cell carcinoma burned off with a cigarette.
Three gas stations in this town now chemo centers so
you needn’t drive to Houston
to sit with pollution needled into your arm,
while far-off bosses who knew all along
hit pocked balls off small hickory tees
towards named greens that go forever on.
IV. Exodus: Bolt Action
I left home to escape the swamp of self.
The locusts swarmed as in the days of Job.
Each wore a prophet’s face.
My mind was a charnel house and a death camp
and a mud pack body wrap in which you twist and steam
as every toxin leaches from your pores.
In every room of my home, the candles had been pinched dark,
the pages of the books wiped white of any word, and some
bacterium had begun to eat out everybody’s eyes
so yellow pus spilled from the lower lids like sick tears
God was a bucket I spoke into, so to protest His absence
or cruel subtlety, I stopped speaking to Him. I ran away
from the land where I never heard His voice.
I hightailed it out.
Nobody sent after me for I was lazy and feckless and poor
at most orders, and I served an inescapable master:
In my head it sits
ugly and loud, hands on the controls
peering out my pie-slit eyeholes—speaking
the voice of my mother telling me to go
make a cardboard sign with a city on it,
stick your thumb out,
run, you little bitch . . .
V. Chronicles: Hell’s Kitchen
Now I live on an island with two million souls
near the shell game and the sign with BUSINESS SUCKS
SALE and the barber hacking ice on the sidewalk
and a man squawking like a jungle toucan
crosses my path flapping his arms and charging
into the street so pedestrians part like water
arms flapping hard as if to leave this steaming earth
but gravity holds him among the rest of us
I come up lat
e to my tenement with a key
in hand and in the doorway folded up
like an angular lawnchair a body
tilted head a snarl of tentacles
asleep with garbage bags layered on to keep off
rain so I must needs step over
his snoring form which rouses
to say in a rich baritone
worthy of Zeus, Excuse me
VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God
Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but you want magic, to win
the lottery you never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan,
no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.
It is small and fond and local. Don’t look for
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
i.e. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
VII. Judges: Awe and Disorder
Don’t doubt for one blip every citizen of this place is an outlaw.
Just stand on a curb, each body strains against its leash,
no intention of not walking when the red, pixelated hand
lights up like a cop’s. Even that humped-over old broad
shoves her silver walker into the oncoming bus’s path
and dares it to flatten her. I’ll bet way back
on the Emerald Isle when the landowner
Lord Suck-On-This rode up on his steed
instructing his henchmen to pull
a sod hut down on the children
as the smallest girl crawled out
to pelt the great rearing stallion
with moldy potatoes, and it’s she now bent
shoves the walker with the force
of her years here.
And that mere slip of a man slim as a brushstroke
trying to sleep in that doorway—when Mao’s henchmen
rushed toward his mother, who set out across the frost field
with him strapped to her back, and the dry stalks
crackling under her stride like glass
smashed on the tyrant’s photo.
We draw mustaches
on the Madonna and our musclemen sometimes don drag.