The Blue Buick
Page 3
slam it through the left field lights.
I can do no wrong, but we are losing.
The coach, an alcoholic, is beginning
to cry over his second wife. His wails
unnerve us. The catcher is stoned,
and we may have to forfeit. The new guy
is unperturbed and praises me lavishly
on my fine play. In the outfield I point out
Draco and Cassiopeia, almost missing one
that drives me into the fence. I hold
the ball high and tip my cap, the crowd
roars, blood runs down my back. Walking in,
he knows I am playing over my head, but says
nothing. We hear the batboy’s shriek,
the coach’s tired moan. The locusts
are shredding the air like band saws,
the scoreboard is blazing at the edges,
and we know that the game will never end.
The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano
The brown wrist and hand with its raw knuckles and blue nails
packed with dirt and oil, pause in midair,
the fingers arched delicately,
and she mimics him, hand held just so, the wrist loose,
then swooping down to the wrong chord.
She lifts her hand and tries again.
Drill collars rumble, hammering the nubbin-posts.
The helper lifts one, turning it slowly,
then lugs it into the lathe’s chuck.
The bit sheers the dull iron into new metal, falling
into the steady chant of lathework,
and the machinist lights a cigarette, holding
in his upturned palms the polonaise he learned at ten,
then later the easiest waltzes,
études, impossible counterpoint
like the voice of his daughter he overhears one night
standing in the backyard. She is speaking
to herself but not herself, as in prayer,
the listener is some version of herself
and the names are pronounced carefully,
self-consciously: Chopin, Mozart,
Scarlatti . . . these gestures of voice and hands
suspended over the keyboard
that move like the lathe in its turning
toward music, the wind dragging the hoist chain, the ring
of iron on iron in the holding rack.
His daughter speaks to him one night,
but not to him, rather someone created between them,
a listener, there and not there,
a master of lathes, a student of music.
The Doppler Effect
When I would go into bars in those days,
the hard round faces would turn
to speak something like loneliness
but deeper, the rain spilling into gutters
or the sound of a car pulling away
in a moment of sleeplessness just before dawn,
the Doppler effect, I would have said shrewdly then,
of faces diminishing slightly into the distance
even as they spoke. Their children
were doing well, somewhere, and their wives
were somewhere, too, and we were here
with those bright euphoric flowers
unfolding slowly in our eyes
and the sun which we had not seen for days
nuzzling our fingertips and licking
our elbows. Oh, it was all there,
and there again the same, our heads nodding,
hands resting lightly upon the mahogany sheen
of the bar. Then someone would leave
and the door would turn to a yellow square
so sudden and full of fire
that our eyes would daze and we would
stare into the long mirrors for hours
and speak shrewdly of that pulling away,
that going toward something.
Toban’s Precision Machine Shop
It has just rained, a slow movement of Mahler
drifts from Toban’s office in back, the windows
blurred by runnels of oil and dirt, and I walk
into the grease-and-water smell like a child
entering his grandfather’s closet. It is a shop
so old the lathes are driven by leather belts
looping down like enormous hackamores
from a long shaft beneath the tin roof’s peak.
Such emptiness. Such a large and palpable
sculpture of disuse: lathes leaning against
their leather straps, grinding wheels motionless
above mounds of iron filings. Tools lie lead-
heavy along the backs of steel workbenches,
burnished where the morning light leaks through
and lifts them up. Calipers and honing cloths
hang suspended in someone’s dream of perfection.
There are times when the sun lingers over
the green plastic panels on the roof, and light
seems to rise from the floor, seems to lift lathes
and floor at once, and something announces itself,
not beauty, but rather its possibility,
and you almost reach out, almost lean forward
to lie down in that wash of bronze light, as if
it would bear you up, would hold you in sleep.
Toban no longer sees the shop advancing
into its day’s purchase of light and dark.
He sits in his office among his books
with music settling down on his shoulders
like a warm shawl. He replaces the Mahler
with Schubert, the B-flat sonata, and sends it
unraveling toward me, turning the sound
far above the cluttered silence of the lathes.
Speaking the Names
When frost first enters the air
in the country of moon and stars,
the world has glass edges, and the hard glint
of crystals seeping over iron
makes even the abandoned tractor seem all night sky and starlight.
On the backporch taking deep breaths like some miracle cure,
breathe, let the spirit move you,
here I am after the long line of cigarettes
that follows grief like a curse, trying to breathe, revive,
in this land of revivals and lost farms . . .
It is no good to grow up hating the rich.
In spring I would lie down among pale anemone and primrose
and listen to the river’s darkening hymn, and soon
the clouds were unraveling like the frayed sleeves of field hands,
and ideology had flown with the sparrows.
The cottonwood that sheltered the henhouse is a stump now,
and the hackberries on the north were leveled years ago.
Bluestem hides the cellar, with its sweet gloom of clay walls and bottles.
The silo looms over the barn, whose huge door swallowed daylight,
where a child could enter his own death.
What became of the boy with nine fingers?
The midwife from Yellow Horse who raised geese?
They turned their backs on the hard life,
and from the tree line along the river they seem to rise now,
her plain dress bronze in moonlight, his wheatshock hair in flames.
Behind me is a house without people. And so, for my sake
I bring them back, watching the quick cloud of vapor that blooms
and vanishes with each syllable: O.T. and Nellie Swearingen,
their children, Locie, Dorrel, Deanie, Bill,
and the late Vinna Adams, whose name I speak into the bright and final air.
Local Knowledge
It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer the
process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery.
—G. SPENCER BROWN, LAWS OF FORM
I.
A rusted-out Ford Fairlane with red star hubcaps
skids up to Neiderland Rig Local No. 1
heaving Travis Deeds into a swirl of dust
and rainbowed pools of oil and yellow mud.
Rows of drill collars stand in racks and howl
in the blunt wind. Chain and hoist cable
bang the side of a tin bunkhouse as men stunned
with hangovers wake to the drum of a new day.
Crowding around the rig floor where the long
column of iron reaches straight down through rock
and salt water, Travis and the men grab
the big tongs and throw them on, then off,
hauling up one length of pipe, then another
as the bit drags out of the hole, coming up
with crushed rock and shark’s teeth from old strata
once under ocean. The drawworks lurches, rumbling
loud enough to smother talk, and the men
work under the iron brand of the noon sun
until mud covers them. Their arms and faces
blacken, and gas fumes sting their eyes.
Two hundred feet up, the crown block pulleys
wail on their axles like high wires, keening.
Travis leans back to see the black mud-hose curl
into a question mark looming from earth to sun.
II.
Dear Father,
As you can see I have
come pretty far north with this bunch
almost to Amarillo in a stretch
of wheat field flat and blowed out as any
to be seen in West Texas. All things
are full of weariness, as the man says,
and I am one of those things, dog-tired
and not fit to shoot. I am very glad
to hear you are back with your church
in Odessa if that is what you want
and if that old bottle does not bring
you down again though it is a comfort
to me, which you do not want to hear,
but alone up there in the crow’s nest
with the wind screaming at me
and that old devil moon staring down
and nothing all around, you get to thinking
you are pretty much nothing yourself.
But I am all OK, staying out
of trouble, and I do not know where
I am going in this world but am looking
as always for a fat paycheck and then
I will be home again. Take good care
of yourself.
Your loving son,
Travis
III.
Travis Deeds’s tongue, throat, wide mouth:
singers of broken tunes and his father’s hymns
in dry creek beds alone with Jack Daniel’s
and the arc of night, the revolving stars.
The eyes pink from booze, dust, and sunlight,
sleepless beneath a football scar that slices
the left eyebrow like a scythe, readers
of Job and Ecclesiastes, crazed in moonlight.
Belly, back, shoulders pale as eggs,
once-broken arm bent slightly, hands mottled
with scraped knuckles and blue fingernails
that thrum like drumfish with the blood’s pulse.
Birthmark like a splash of acid on one thigh,
darkening hair of the loins, sad cock, legs thick
as stumps, knees yellow-brown with old bruises,
ludicrous feet, small toes curled like snails.
Slowly the traveling block lifts his body
to the rig’s top. Blond hair blazing, he sings
flat against the hard wind, rising, staring down
into the rig’s black strata, the fossil kingdom.
IV.
Dearest son,
What gain has the worker
from his toil? I’m a little short here,
and if you could spare maybe fifty?
Am back on my feet, though, feisty
and full of the Word. So I turned
to consider wisdom and madness
and folly, and so should you for one
of these days God will show His face
to you as He has to me, you think
your alone in this world, that your
nothing, but you are not, believe me.
There is more to life than sweat
and dirt and oil and fat paychecks.
Remember, better is a handful
of quietness than two hands full
of toil and a striving after wind.
I know this in my poor banged-up soul
I hope you can come home soon
for it is lonely as hell here, that old wolf
scratching at my door.
Love,
Avon
V.
Gargantuan plates move over the mantle of the earth.
The jammed crust up-thrusts and rivers spill down,
dumping red dirt in layers, choking themselves dry.
On the west, the Pecos River; on the east,
canyons of the high plains: Palo Duro,
Tule, Casa Blanca, Quitaque, Yellow House.
Calcium bubbles up to form the caprock.
Sod grass spreads under the wind. The dirt holds.
Around the rig now, plowed fields lose the dirt
in gusts, and roughnecks breathe through rags
like small-time bandits. Five miles east, a gray wolf
drags its kill beneath a jagged branch of mesquite.
Under the raucous sky sandhill cranes ruffle
the pond water with their wings, lumbering into flight.
Everywhere the flat land has given up its wheat
and maize, and dust rises along the horizon
like a huge planet out of orbit, colliding.
Travis Deeds, greasing the crown block,
leans against the wind and sees the open mouth
of the sun slowly drowning in the brown air.
VI.
Dear Father,
Enclosed is a check
for fifty bucks, please hang onto it.
Good news here. The geologist took
what is called a core sample and says
that it is a sure thing this time.
As for your letter, you say not
to feel like nothing, but it seems to me
there is a lot to be said for nothing.
The other night I was alone
with just the moon and stars
and the locusts buzzing away
and could look down the hole
into the nothing of the earth
and above into the nothing of the sky
and there I was in the middle
of it all until I was nothing too
not even Travis Deeds but just the eye
that the world uses to look at itself.
So maybe that is a place in the world,
not that you would agree. But I am
on day shift now and if the geologist
is right and we are right next door
to pay dirt, I should be home soon
with my sack full.
Your loving son,
Travis
VII.
Crew, drawworks, the whole rig floor are dragged
under the dirt storm, roughneck shouts sinking
beneath the wind’s harangue, the berserk clatter
of chains, cable, bunkhouse roof yanking loose.
And for a while in the sudden rush and whirl
the body clings to the crown block, grease-slick
hands grasping, then spilling like fish over
the iron rails as the false night swallows
the land the way the land folds its creatures
into bedrock fossils. The body is blown f
ree.
The arms wheel, the legs blunder like tossed sticks,
the soft earth surrounds and pulls him down.
Blood batters the heart in flight, pounding
like the flailing wings of cranes, the quickening
breath of the wolf returning to his kill,
the mesquite branch shaking in the nervous wind.
Put forth thy hand now and touch his bone and flesh.
And the men gather where he slams the ground,
where the body is the obedient son of gravity,
where his hands claw the thickening dust, where
the buckled spine rages, where the unknowable God
does not speak the unknowable answer and the great wing
folds and unfolds and once more under the sun’s
long pull the wind makes its hollow yowl of lament.
Kansas
Leaning against my car after changing the oil,
I hold my black hands out and stare into them
as if they were the faces of my children looking
at the winter moon and thinking of the snow
that will erase everything before they wake.
In the garage, my wife comes behind me
and slides her hands beneath my soiled shirt.
Pressing her face between my shoulder blades,
she mumbles something, and soon we are laughing,
wrestling like children among piles of old rags,
towels that unravel endlessly, torn sheets,
work shirts from twenty years ago when I stood
in the door of a machine shop, grease-blackened,
and Kansas lay before me blazing with new snow,
a future of flat land, white skies, and sunlight.
After making love, we lie on the abandoned
mattress and stare at our pale winter bodies
sprawling in the half-light. She touches her belly,
the scar of our last child, and the black
prints of my hands along her hips and thighs.
The Soliloquy of the Appliance Repairman
They bring me their broken toasters,
chrome-dulled and shorted on lumps of grease,
twisted Mixmasters with mangled blades
and bent spindles punch-drunk