when our mother says, “Kill
the Indian to save the man,”
but the killers fail, saved
to live to kill again (“kill”
meaning “kill” from code
to code, codes a child could crack
even if his tongue’s in tatters), a war
can be won, but not the one
that matters.
TYRIAN PURPLE
Because a parchment plain and pale as sails
doesn’t avail gold ink, and because raw silk
for empresses must not be the shade of chalk,
the murex-fishers bait their wicker creels
with cockles, catch and crush the spiny snails,
then cut the glands out for two drops of milk—
black as clotted blood, expelled when the whelks balk—
to make the putrid dye worth more than pearls.
Fisher of Men, king of the purple page,
before you died, gore matted in your hair,
men flogged you, wound you in a purple rag.
Ascended, enthroned in Caesar’s attire,
your mantle now redeems you with his wage:
twelve thousand deaths upon the shores of Tyre.
PIGS (SEE SWINE)
In library books, the rules for subjects long-assigned:
for children’s tales, use “pigs”; for grown-ups’, prefer “swine.”
How now, white sow, on which one will you dine?
Wilbur is “some pig”; Napoleon, some swine.
But there’s a book whose pigskin bindings shine
for youth and aged alike, in which the terms align,
pigs and swine; and in its stories, sow supine,
your litter’s better bacon in a poke done up with twine.
The Evangels spin a story from the silken ears of swine:
the swineherds eat their lunches by the mountain’s steep decline,
by the tombs, where wind’s perfumed with marjoram and thyme,
with the sweet smell of the cedars, the sweet reek of the swine;
and by the tombs, a bruised man roots for acorns, as benign
in his iron fetters as the Son of Man, the Vine,
who withers branches, makes blood out of wine.
The shackled shouting man’s a temple with no shrine,
or two thousand shrines, and every one maligned
by other gods, other incarnations, so this text opines:
gods unclean as hordes of hogs, scores of swine,
hooves divided, eyes savage, tails serpentine.
O lardlings, your Lord cometh, and you know not his design.
He sails across still waters and his lips are caked with brine.
Piglets, he will not give this generation a sign,
unless that sign be read in demons, in the bristling flesh of swine.
For “swine,” see “pneuma,” see “spirit,” see the soul unconfined.
See incarnation thistle-pink with hock and flank and rind.
See madman counsel madman, chapter, verse, and line.
See spirits seek for bodies, and see the spirits find.
See the book consign the flock, loin and heart and mind,
to a tumble through the salty sky, their transport undefined.
Over the cliff, swine see pigs, and pigs see swine—
legion, yet one: porcine, insane, divine.
OFERMOD
Now, tell me one difference,” my sister says,
“between Old English and New English.”
Well, Old English has a word for our kind
of people: ofermod, literally
“overmind,” or “overheart,”
or “overspirit,” often translated
“overproud.” When the warrior Byrhtnoth,
overfool, invited the Vikings
across the ford at Maldon to fight
his smaller troop at closer range,
his overpride proved deadlier
than the gold-hilted and file-hard
swords the poet gleefully describes—
and aren’t we like that, high-strung
and ofermod as our daddy and granddaddies
and everybody else
in our stiff-necked mountain town,
always with something stupid to prove,
doing 80 all the way to the head of the holler,
weaving through the double lines;
splinting a door-slammed finger
with popsicle sticks and electrical tape;
not filling out the forms for food stamps
though we know we qualify.
Sister, I’ve seen you cuss rivals,
teachers, doctors, bill collectors,
lawyers, cousins, strangers
at the red light or the Walmart;
you start it, you finish it,
you everything-in-between-it,
whether it’s with your fists,
or a two-by-four, or a car door,
and it doesn’t matter that your foe’s
stronger, taller, better armed.
I don’t tell a soul when I’m down
to flour and tuna and a half-bag of beans
so you’ve not seen me do without
just to do without, just for spite
at them who told us,
“It’s a sin to be beholden.”
If you’re Byrhtnoth
lying gutted on the ground,
speechifying at the troops he’s doomed,
then I’m the idiot campaigner
fighting beside his hacked-up lord
instead of turning tail,
insisting, “Mind must be the harder,
heart the keener, spirit the greater,
as our strength lessens.”
Now, don’t that sound familiar?
We’ve bought it all our lives
as it’s been sold by drunkards,
bruisers, goaders, soldiers,
braggers with a single code:
you might be undermined, girl,
but don’t you never be undermod.
LAMPBLACK
Black as a charred plum-stone, as a plume
from a bone-fire, as a flume of ravens
startled from a battle-tree—this lantern resin
the monk culls from soot to quill the doom
and glory of the Lord won’t fade. The grime
of letters traced upon the riven
calf-skin gleams dark as fresh ash on a shriven
penitent, as heaven overawing time.
World’s Glim, Grim Cinderer, is it sin
or history or a whimsied hex that burns
all life to tar? We are dust, carbon
spilled out from your Word, a lamp overturned
into the pit of pitch beneath your pen,
the inkhorn filled before the world was born.
FORTUNES OF MEN
When a youngun’s born,
only God, the Anointer, knows
what the winters have in store:
the Lord is on him like a duck
on a junebug; the Lord tracks her
like a trained coonhound
and orders fate and fortune
just as it pleases him to do.
To each he gives a dab:
one will wring enough of chickens’ necks
to get to where she hates
the smell of chicken and dumplings.
One will work the dirt; one will punch
a timecard; one will be too agitated
to hold down any job for long.
It is one’s doom to get switched
all through life. (The Measurer makes
trees bear switches in their seasons.)
Another will rev his Dodge
around the lake of a Saturday night,
lit up on Old Crow,
but will never wreck, never run
some innocent off the road;
that lucky one will fall
&nbs
p; into the yard and pass out
safely in the grass that God,
the Sower, made to be his bed.
A certain one mixes Xanax and methadone;
his veins shake him to a youthful death,
and his mother forgets for a moment
her husband’s dealings with some skank,
her slide into the yellow Camaro
of some high-school boy;
her own name is weary to her.
One must wear the badge,
must kick in the doors
of pot growers and meth heads;
and one must get his door kicked in.
So has the Enforcer planned it,
to whom men must give thanks.
A certain one must get a job
(the only job for miles around,
as the Lord, the Overseer,
ordains) dynamiting
mountains to get at the coal;
another one must use the coal
to heat her stove; another one
must use the coal to heat
her curling iron. A certain one
gets rich converting cheap land,
pure water, cheap labor into rayon.
One must fix a supper every night;
and one must give the supper away
to them worse off just down the pike.
One is good at figures; one is good
at nailing boards; one is good
at telling tales; one is good
at meanness; one is good
at making do; one is good
at taking rednecks for a ride.
Must one sing of this? One must:
to a certain one is given the harp,
which like the sword does not depart
from this land; and that one must
praise God for the sorrow
he creates. So the mighty Lord,
the Regulator, deals out to all
across the surface of the earth—
and also in these hills, which he makes
to crumble, as befits his notions,
and his plenty, and his mercies,
which one cannot resist, but does.
NICODEMUS MAKES AN ANALYSIS
Thesis: That the body cannot repent
of its own nativity, cannot re-form,
like water can, into clouds or ice
or tides. That the body can only pull
forward: does not Qoheleth say
the silver cord snaps, the golden bowl
crashes, the jar is shattered at the spring?
So I have it in my annotations: the body
ages, bones raging to return to crushed stone,
decomposing leaves. The living body,
by the time it’s old, must be full of earth
ground into its pores—from decades
of work or play or travel; or from inertia,
bands of dust settling, as onto bookshelves,
into layers of marrow—so fertile, flowers
could bloom from anyone’s eyes or mouth.
Grass withers, flowers fall, writes the Prophet.
And eloquently, I might add—not like this youth
who can’t construct a story with any unity
of metaphor, who weaves and warps
his plainclothes homilies without regard
for the listener’s sensibilities. And clarity?
He quips a snippet from the Psalmist—
out of context, to be sure—and slaps it on
his ramblings as a patch. But I digress
from my topic. Thesis: That the body
is only made for one space, one duration.
On the shore, the spines and ribs of what were fish—
tiny harps, the music drummed out of them
by the sea. Water, then salt.
Is an old man’s body any different?
Methuselah, who outlived even rocks,
did so in the one body; Enoch, who sidestepped
death, did so in the one body. Thesis:
That our bodies are too ravaged in their wanderings,
their meal-takings and slumberings, to desire
more than one gestation. Is this the way
you think? he said. The way you see?
And left me no time to reply, to show him
my sources, all I have collected. Years
of marginalia and notations—all disseminated,
as by a bellows-blast. My life’s work!
He would have nothing of it, but kept up
his discourse. No data, no statistics—his logic
one of circles circling circles, his proofs
spinning and arcing, never lighting: phylacteries
opened, their frail contents flown.
I sat. I studied the fire. And I followed,
not his argument, but his gestures, his fingers
tricking my vision in the shadows. Such fingers—
I cannot sleep for thinking about them, how thin
the skin on the tips, as if they were made of paper.
Thesis: That each of his fingers is a page
from a water-sodden book—the meanings
delicate, on the verge of being torn apart,
rendered unreadable. That his face
is the face that the wind wears when it carries rain
or scratches the thunder purple and blue.
Whoever watches the wind will not plant,
whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.
I forget who said that. And I’m no longer sure
which citations I might wish to keep: my body
of work immaterial, like water condensed
to mere conjecture—what once filled
a river, a cup, a womb, nothing but air.
Hypothesis: That my books are wrong—
or riddled with misprints, faulty definitions.
Come morning, I must make a few revisions.
BIBLIA PAUPERUM
This fold-out triptych, gilded comic book,
is mostly images, sufficient
for the poor to understand;
Gothic-scripted reds and blues and golds
provide the bit of text the pastor’s flock
can’t read and aren’t allowed to touch.
In the middle panel, the Magi give
their patrons’ wages to the child,
who doesn’t know what money is;
on the left, Abner switches to David’s side
after stabbing David’s men
(a gold staff makes an enemy a friend);
on the right, Sheba offers Solomon gold
(what is gold to a rich man but a boring story
he still likes hearing over and over?).
On a different page, the first priest,
Melchizadek, hands bread to Abraham,
while in another panel manna falls,
gilt-outlined globes Moses plucks from the sky
and gives to the people, who have nothing
but a leader and their shared hunger;
in the center panel, the Last Supper,
the cup is gold, the bread is gold,
and the bread’s not for the body
but the spirit. The colors are so garish,
even the poor can understand
(not the poor in spirit but the poor
in fact) what illuminates
Christ’s dough-white face—the waste
of love, the supper gone cold without a taste.
MINIUM
The monk stipples the page with convoluted trails
of lead toasted rust-red, brick-red, the color
first used for rubric and for miniature.
Three thousand tiny dots prick the initials,
as if the text itself were pierced with nails,
red edging each green, black, or yellow letter
to embolden the story of Christ’s dolor
and his murder, his earthborn travails.
Some letters aren’
t filled in. The red dots, wrapped
obsessive round the page, perhaps so vexed
their maker that the monk just stopped—
or else he didn’t know what happened next
and so kept dotting, blotting, dotting, trapped
inside Christ’s body, a bloody outline with no text.
ANAGRAM: SEE A GRAY PINE
in memory, Ena Gay Pierce
See a gray pine in January that ought to be green
See me pining for a gray-headed one
See the gray shale with its pines unpinned
See a pin from her pincushion under the bed
See a gray cookpot of pinto beans
See gray hairs caught in an old bobby pin
See me gray, still pining
Whose gray hills are these, unpined?
Gray crone: thine
SOLIDUS OF THE EMPRESS IRENE, AD 797–802
Numismatists know it’s just a coin
despite its name, related to the Latin
for safe—salvus—
and entire—sollus—
for the safety money brings,
for the entirety it becomes to kings,
homeowners, parents, execs,
all of us whose bills are due before our checks.
It’s not an icon, though the gold’s the same
as the gold membrane
surrounding Mary, Jesus, Elijah, John,
all constellated around Irene
on this gray wall, Irene the iconodule,
who made icons the center of her rule
after she stole the throne from Constantine
the 6th, her son, whom she had blinded, an icon
with his painted eyes scratched out. Irene’s
four ringlets clink like strings of coins,
her eyes are coins, her tunic’s printed
with tiny coins. She glints new-minted
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