and the clods cleave fast together, yea, where night yawns
above the river in its long, dark dream, above
haggard branches of mesquite, chicken hawks scudding
into the tree line, and moon-glitter on caliche
like the silver plates of Coronado’s treasure
buried all these years, but the absence of treasure,
absence of whatever would return the world
to the strangeness that as children we embraced
and recognized as life. Rave on.
Cars are cheap
at Roman’s Salvage strewn along the fence out back
where cattle graze and chew rotting fabric from the seats.
Twenty bucks for spare parts and a night in the garage
could make them run as far as death and stupidity
required—on Johnson Road where two miles of low shoulders
and no fence line would take you up to sixty, say,
and when you flipped the wheel clockwise, you were there
rolling in the belly of the whale, belly of hell,
and your soul fainteth within you for we had seen it done
by big Ed Ravenscroft who said you would go in a boy
and come out a man, and so we headed back through town
where the marquee of the Plaza flashed CREATURE FROM
THE BLACK LAGOON in storefront windows and the Snack Shack
where we had spent our lives was shutting down and we
sang rave on, it’s a crazy feeling out into the night
that loomed now like a darkened church, and sang loud
and louder still for we were sore afraid.
Coming up
out of the long tunnel of cottonwoods that opens onto
Johnson Road, Travis with his foot stuck deep into the soul
of that old Ford come on, Bubba, come on beating
the dash with his fist, hair flaming back in the wind
and eyes lit up by some fire in his head that I
had never seen, and Mike, iron Mike, sitting tall
in back with Billy, who would pick a fight with anything
that moved but now hunched over mumbling something
like a prayer, as the Ford lurched on spitting
and coughing but then smoothing out suddenly fast
and the fence line quitting so it was open field, then,
then, I think, we were butt-deep in regret and a rush
of remembering whatever we would leave behind—
Samantha Dobbins smelling like fresh laundry,
light from the movie spilling down her long blonde hair,
trout leaping all silver and pink from Black Bear Creek,
the hand of my mother, I confess, passing gentle
across my face at night when I was a child—oh, yes,
it was all good now and too late, trees blurring
past and Travis wild, popping the wheel, oh too late
too late
and the waters pass over us the air thick
as mud slams against our chest though turning now
the car in its slow turning seems almost graceful
the frame in agony like some huge animal groaning
and when the wheels leave the ground the engine cuts loose
with a wail thin and ragged as a band saw cutting tin
and we are drowning breathless heads jammed against
our knees and it’s a thick swirling purple nightmare
we cannot wake up from for the world is turning too
and I hear Billy screaming and then the whomp
sick crunch of glass and metal whomp again back window
popping loose and glass exploding someone crying out
tink tink of iron on iron overhead and then at last
it’s over and the quiet comes
Oh so quiet. Somewhere
the creak and grind of a pumping unit. Crickets.
The tall grass sifting the wind in a mass of whispers
that I know I’ll be hearing when I die. And so
we crawled trembling from doors and windows borne out
of rage and boredom into weed-choked fields barren
as Golgotha. Blood raked the side of Travis’s face
grinning rapt, ecstatic, Mike’s arm was hanging down
like a broken curtain rod, Billy kneeled, stunned,
listening as we all did to the rustling silence
and the spinning wheels in their sad, manic song
as the Ford’s high beams hurled their crossed poles of light
forever out into the deep and future darkness. Rave on.
I survived. We all did. And then came the long surrender,
the long, slow drifting down like young hawks riding on
the purest, thinnest air, the very palm of God
holding them aloft so close to something hidden there,
and then the letting go, the fluttering descent, claws
spread wide against the world, and we become, at last,
our fathers. And do not know ourselves and therefore
no longer know each other. Mike Luckinbill ran a Texaco
in town for years. Billy Heinz survived a cruel divorce,
remarried, then took to drink. But finally last week
I found this house in Arizona where the brothers
take new names and keep a vow of silence and make
a quiet place for any weary, or lost, passenger
of earth whose unquiet life has brought him there,
and so, after vespers, I sat across the table
from men who had not surrendered to the world,
and one of them looked at me and looked into me,
and I am telling you there was a fire in his head
and his eyes were coming fast down a caliche road,
and I knew this man, and his name was Travis Doyle.
A Photograph of the Titanic
When Travis came home from the monastery,
the ground had vanished beneath him,
and he went everywhere in bare feet
as if he were walking on a plane of light,
and he spoke of his sleepless nights
and of a picture in National Geographic:
a pair of shoes from the Titanic resting
on the ocean floor. They were blue
against a blue ground and a black garden
of iron and brass. The toes pointed outward,
toward two continents, and what had been
inside them had vanished so completely
that he imagined it still there, with the sea’s
undersway bellying down each night
as each day after compline he fell into
his bed, the dark invisible bulk of tons
pushing down on the shoes, nudging them
across the blue floor, tossing them aside
like a child’s hands in feverish sleep
until the shoestrings scattered and dissolved.
Sometimes he would dream of the shoes
coming to rest where it is darkest,
after the long fall before we are born,
when we gather our bodies around us,
when we curl into ourselves and drift
toward the little sleep we have rehearsed
again and again as if falling we might drown.
Blood Rain
Beset by an outbreak of plague in 1503, Nurembergers were further terrified by a concurrent phenomenon called a blood rain, . . . Dürer recorded the resulting stains on a servant girl’s linen shift: . . . a crucifix flanked by ghostly figures.
—FRANCES RUSSELL, THE WORLD OF DÜRER 1471–1528.
Like rust on iron, red algae invading rain.
And again, the plague. Nuremberg in ruin.
At home alone, the artist prays for grace
while, gates flung open, the neighbor’s geese
roam the yard in droves, and their wild honks
&nb
sp; and the ravings of a servant girl bring Dürer
to the window. She stands there, her wet hair
clumped in black strands, and her arms fall limp
in a great sob, her head lolling, while the damp
shift she wears blotters the rain in red streaks—
like wounds slowly spreading, Dürer sees, to make
a sign: in the bleeding fabric of her dress
as if etched in copper hangs Christ upon His Cross
between two ghosts. Cruel miracles, God’s grace
drawn in God’s blood on the body of a girl who sighs
at him, swoons, and collapses in the mud.
Outside, gutters turning scarlet, the dead
hauled from house to wagon, cries of women
battering the windowpanes. Inside, the burin
drops from Dürer’s hand as the girl wakes
and rises from the bench below his portrait,
done in Munich the year of the apocalypse, but
never to be sold, never to leave the artist’s house.
She touches once more God’s message on her dress,
then turns and stares at the painting’s face
so solemn, so godlike in its limpid gaze,
that she backs away to study the long brown locks
spread evenly about His shoulders, the beatific
right hand held more gently than the blessing
of a priest, and the inscription in a tongue
she does not understand. This is Christ!
No, it’s me, he says, touching hand to chest,
the rough right hand, the human chest, the heart’s dream
of art’s divinity as death rolls down the street.
The Death of a Psychic
The obituary in the L.A. Times says that you foresaw
your own death, also a boy, dead, in a storm drain
with the wrong shoes on the wrong feet. Death
became your specialty: a yellow shirt, the flung
corsage near, vaguely, water, the odd detail drawing
squad cars and ambulance to the scene you dreaded.
I imagine nightmares that you woke up to instead
of from, the heavy winter coat of prophecy that hung
from your shoulders any season, especially summer
when mayhem bloomed below a bleeding sun
and dark angels, gorged on smog and heat, unfurled
their wings to wake you gasping in your dampened bed,
again, once more. No theophanies, no “still small voice”
or hovering dove, but only gray, murky hunches
bubbling from the mud of intuition, the sudden starts
and flights of vision, and of course, its shadow, fear.
But to live haunted by the knowledge of a certain year
when you would stumble in your flannel house robe
through a sunlit kitchen and lie down on cold linoleum
beneath, at last, the wide wings of the present tense.
Luck
I sit looking into the mirror at the bitter man
sitting opposite me whose book has been rejected
for the last time: the familiar face I have never liked,
the mournful eyes, mournful even in happiness,
broken mouth, nose like a fig, the melancholy face
of a man whose gift of perseverance I have admired
though now he disappoints me as I watch
the blue bile of self-pity welling up in drab,
sad little lunettes below his eyes. I begin to think,
I am lucky, I am lucky, to live in a country
where the son of a machinist can piss away his time
writing poems, . . . and I think of that odd word,
lucky, its strange sound, the uck sound
of a duck barfing or even choking to death,
its ridiculous webbed feet fanning the air,
writhing uck, uck, or the miserable, queer sound
of galoshes unstuck from the mud, uck, the sound
of disgust at the vile, sick, nasty, repugnant,
the blackened lemon stuck under the fruit bin, uck,
the gross, the foul, the lucky, rhyming with FUCK E
as in Fuck Everett written in dust on the back
of a semi hauling dog food to Peoria or painted
in Day-Glo on the water tower by E’s acne-ridden,
rabid ex-girlfriend, but there is, on the other hand,
lucky’s lovely “L” sound, preferred by Yeats
among all phonemes, called a liquid and cited
in all the Intro. to Poetry texts for its melody,
its grace, its small-breasted, skinny-hipped, lithe
evocativeness, “L,” the Audrey Hepburn of consonants,
as in lily, ladle, lap, lip, lust, labia, loquacious,
or LUCKY!, e.g., Hail! Good fortune attend thee,
Horatio, you lucky bastard, or Good luck, Leonard,
I hope you get lucky, or the word being implicit
in the deed, therefore the very act, the event, of luck,
the sun coming out in the fifth inning, a ten-dollar bill
falling out of the dryer, the tragic diagnosis reversed,
Jules and Jim and One-Eyed Jacks back-to-back,
no school, a cool summer, a warm winter, the big,
beautiful book containing twenty years of poems
WITH YOUR NAME ON THEM, lucky, a stupid word,
a wrong word, easily used, badly understood, the tiny,
pathetic wet dream of me and Everett and that whole town
surrounding a water tower where a girl stands
with phosphorescent green paint dribbling down
her wrist, mumbling, luck, oh luck, just a little, just some, luck.
A Roman Grave
He begins to fear the gray morning light,
the absence out of which each day arises,
an iron sun dragging through a grinding fog.
Along the mews the long cars of the Romanovs
move quietly as clouds to line the curb
of the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile.
He sees them far below as crows, black umbrellas
slick with rain beneath the red-leaved trees,
old women draped in veils and funeral scarves.
A Europe of confusions, history’s scattered
flocks mumbling unintelligible prayers
while the chauffeurs take out their cigarettes.
Later, he watches diggers on the Thames’
south side haul up rocks from a Roman grave,
a girl buried beside her brother. Strata
lie piled like quilts beside the small pits
where a man and woman kneel in their shadows.
The dead in their stone sleep are roused into
history. The living pray into the earth and wait.
On the Passing of Jesus Freaks from the College Classroom
They seemed to come in armies, whole platoons
uniformed in headbands, cut-off jeans,
butt-long hair that fell down in festoons,
and their grins were the ends that justified the means.
But one was different. And alone. His wrist tattoo
cried FATHER on a severed heart that bled.
His arms hung limp as vines, his nails were blue,
his silence was the chorus of the dead.
“Are you saved?” they asked. “Saved from what,” I said.
“The flames of hell, your rotten, sinful past,
your thing for Desdemona,” for we had read
the tragedies, and Othello was the last.
“What’s Iago’s motive? Was he just sinful?”
They thought they knew but waited for a hint.
He raised his hands and wept, “Evil, fucking Evil.”
And he meant it. And he knew what he meant.
Brazil
This is for Elton Wayne Showalter, redneck
surrealist
who, drunk, one Friday night tried to hold up the local 7-Eleven
with a caulking gun, and who, when Melinda Bozell boasted
that she would never let a boy touch her “down there,” said,
“Down there? You mean, like, Brazil?”
Oh, Elton Wayne,
with your silver-toed turquoise-on-black boots and Ford Fairlane
dragging, in a ribbon of sparks, its tailpipe down Main Street
Saturday nights, you dreamed of Brazil and other verdant lands,
but the southern hemisphere remained for all those desert years
a vast mirage shimmering on the horizon of what one might call
your mind, following that one ugly night at the Snack Shack
when, drunk again, you peed on your steaming radiator
to cool it down and awoke at the hospital, groin empurpled
from electric shock and your pathetic maleness swollen
like a bruised tomato. You dumb bastard, betting a week’s wages
on the trifecta at Raton, then in ecstasy tossing the winning
ticket into the air and watching it float on an ascending breeze
out over the New Mexico landscape forever and beyond: gone.
The tears came down, but the spirit rose late on Sunday night
on a stepladder knocking the middle letters from FREEMAN GLASS
to announce unlimited sexual opportunities in purple neon
for all your friends driving Kansas Avenue as we did each night
lonely and boredom-racked and hungering for someone like you,
Elton Wayne, brilliantly at war in that flat, treeless county
against maturity, right-thinking, and indeed intelligence
in all its bland, local guises, so that now reading the announcement
in the hometown paper of your late marriage to Melinda Bozell
with a brief honeymoon at the Best Western in Junction City,
I know that you have finally arrived, in Brazil, and the Kansas
that surrounds you is an endless sea of possibility, genius, love.
Weather Report
We will have a continuation of today tomorrow.
Clouds will form those ragged gloves
in which the hands of God make giant fists
as He grits His teeth against the slaves
The Blue Buick Page 9