Tropic of Squalor: Poems

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.