Forage

  When the women traveled to the next county to buy beer,

  it was for conditioning their hair. That was the belief,

  though the well water could not have been sweeter

  and every curl in that quarter was born lustrous.

  If boys drove back roads, bottles open, and swerved

  on bridges, if they did sink into rivers, silt bottoms softened

  the fall. They were saved by the depth. Deep like the registers

  new to their voices when they sang the old ballads.

  And some girls who grew up hearing abstain and scrimp,

  spurn and scrape by, learned to recall only what fondly wets

  the eye. Summer parties in uncut fields. Lingering so long,

  before I left, my skirt was drinking dawn dew.

  PEACH JUICE

  A woman may wake, a coupe from the cocktail

  she enjoys each evening left on the counter,

  and eat peaches over it, dripping.

  While rivers go dry

  and the Mississippi—that immensity, crossing

  the length of the country—

  brings to the ocean such toxicity

  they meet in what’s known as the dead zone.

  Algae blooms, consumes oxygen,

  suffocates fish, kills even krill.

  Blooms. Gardenia and jasmine scent share

  the air she breathes in.

  Juice runs off her chin, a small stream

  that doesn’t flow prevailing currents’ way,

  for which exception is made.

  A tributary. If only she knew what tribute,

  in return, to pay. And the gulf in her glass,

  gathering—if its good could be

  of the sweep, of the scale, of the sea.

  A PARTICIPATION OF WATERS

  It’s raining and I let myself sit and look

  a long time. At water returning, or rather,

  that never went away. Earth today

  has the same amount of water as it did when Christ lived,

  I read in a book. A beautiful idea,

  so inclusive. And interrupted by news breaking:

  * * *

  Another black American’s killing.

  This is happening today, so much the same,

  a stagnant refrain. And the rivers remain

  those that slave songs name. Trade routes

  still trafficked, that can’t be crossed

  to another world, or wash anyone clean.

  * * *

  A river doesn’t come from a single spring.

  It’s side channels, seepage, and sewers, a system

  of streams. It’s a participation of waters.

  And in a storm, who can claim she’s just watching?

  How the flow from my gutters goes, to join

  the runoff in the public road—

  BEFORE THE FIRST BELL

  “In this election, arrogance and rancor win with rural white men.”

  This is for Travis, Levi, Lyman, the end of the gentleness in him

  learned from the soft, cupped shape of the coves of home.

  Where for every second he spent firing a gun, he’d been silent

  days’ worth of dawns watching deer, moving lightly as he could

  over the earth’s surface crackling with fall leaves, among fragilities

  to which he paid mind. Where, for any single notion about keeping

  to his kind, there were so many minnows to count in the creeks,

  bodies of unnamable color moving in an element other than his own.

  But for him, the place became a pail whose confines he circles,

  the oxygen all breathed up. Where prospects do not brighten

  as the landscape is ever more fluorescent lit. He is crowded

  into trailers, and with a certain type of men, whose muttered hatreds

  headlines and elections declare loudly now. Now, I cannot extract him,

  tell of the delicacy with which one boy once drew threads dripping nectar

  from the throats of honeysuckle. The truth is, the flowers I remember

  him with were plastic. He brought these as gifts to me, and a fledgling

  from a nest on the playground at our elementary school. Where he returned

  to the polls, where he cast his ballot. The eyes were sealed, yet see-through.

  The featherless skin bare against the hands it passed into. The bird died before

  the first bell. Maybe I should have been frightened from the very beginning.

  Or this should be an elegy for my heart, the understandings, clemencies,

  it will no longer hold.

  WHO STAYS

  She’s stung with resentment like nettle-slapped girl’s legs

  in summer all year, how many years, not leaving out of here.

  So often, mud sucks at her feet saying, Squandered. But still

  there are a few trout lilies, blossoms down-turned,

  heads dropped, faces hidden. Those who don’t try to show,

  and see something in this dirt. Wildflowers tend to themselves

  while all people plant these days are satellite dishes.

  Their necks crane in crazy directions to get any shot at the sky,

  some signal from far off.

  RETURN VISIT

  It’s cut off, the hotel. From the town

  to which there are no sidewalks. The grassy

  bit between walled interstates each going

  opposite, absolute directions away. The air

  outside unopenable windows. The Appalachian

  ridges in sight beyond, above the low, base lines

  of box stores, but not in reach. The question

  How did I ever leave mountains? displaced

  by What’s left of here? in a chain business.

  Called that, but link-less. Even fully booked,

  a vacant building.

  It was isolation of another kind, no roads across

  rough terrain, growing up talking to oneself

  in an uninfluenced accent, that once let a rural place

  keep alive its ways. In the lobby, there’s a pamphlet

  about the past, folk art. Images to make study of,

  here where I’m stuck. A sculpture, an ark, crafted

  from scrap wood, populated by pigs and possums.

  Not lions and elephants. By locals, not exotics

  the carver couldn’t, in his time, know. His focus

  devoted, defined by hills, tightly framing how far

  the eye will go.

  Though today too, in a traveler—in rented rooms,

  in walls where water sound can only be the brook

  of next door’s flushing, in departure gates’ fluorescent light

  where any foliage is faux—sincere feeling arises. An urge

  to unseal the sterile, individual package of every lonely

  soap and peanut. And the airport shuttle offers a view

  of curing tobacco, a traditional crop, or a ruinous one.

  But a color that is a glory, in any case. The gold it turns

  because it has been cut. So long, the ark was adrift.

  Consider the many beasts, the wild beliefs,

  it carried forward.

  PASTORAL

  Cattle are a black weight on the light sway of land that was once

  prairie. The wind pulls at pasture, wantful; they appear to hold it in place.

  Though it was the cattle that ate away the native grasses.

  Perhaps the impressi
on is scenic because their necks are bent

  with the downward stroke of feeding. I could say the oil derricks

  too are feeding, with enormous avian pecks.

  Or that they are nodding in assent. Yes, yes, we are allowed

  so much. Let us strike, again, the pose of plenty.

  FINE DUST

  Is there time to marry, or at least

  to buy a house, plant a maple by the door,

  and see it mature? That’s what the small

  mind asks when someone speaks

  about the big picture:

  How soon the aquifer underlying

  the heartland, water older than the Ice Ages,

  will have been pumped dry to irrigate corn,

  to feed hogs.

  * * *

  But what about the narrowness of vision

  that kept settlers on their land all through

  the Dust Bowl? Wasn’t it admirable,

  how they could not see living elsewhere

  and stayed through ten years of storms

  while all fertile soil was stripped away?

  Of course, there are the broader

  human habits. How when we stopped

  looking to the sky, the past’s reverent pose

  of asking for rain, we kept on making

  demands from prairie plowed to desert land.

  Now irrigators draw water from below,

  and we don’t drop our heads.

  * * *

  What the Dust Bowl did, mostly,

  was make a sweeping statement,

  wiping people out. The families who waited

  through it were faceless and voiceless, hanging

  wet towels over their heads to breathe

  through the dust, and so they could not speak.

  The earth blurred the fine lines of fences,

  drifting feet of itself over post tops

  so animals walked above them and away.

  Still there is some comfort to be taken

  from details: During storms,

  people kept close, clustered in one room.

  And static electricity sparked

  on spikes of barbed wire, highlighting

  the boundaries of property.

  * * *

  When every bit of sun

  was obscured by the topsoil

  of a million wasted acres rising up,

  dirt-blinded people reached

  for each other in the dark.

  And our hands practice the same

  spanning gesture across the space

  of beds, after every ordinary evening’s

  blackout falling.

  REPEAL

  An abandoned mansion,

  from the time of Temperance,

  what it must have held:

  hair bobbed short,

  cocktails poured tall,

  not just drunkenness

  but the double sin

  of deception too.

  Finally, the house is allowing

  itself to fall,

  letting down the white walls.

  Better to rot outright,

  return lot to field,

  render lumber down to dirt—

  that’s the closest to cleanliness,

  to righteous, you’ll get.

  So the sight seems to say.

  Or I have come for that answer.

  If there is one, to the question

  of why be here, anywhere I stand,

  anywhere I go.

  WHAT SURVIVES

  There is sweat at the back of our necks

  seven months out of the year. That’s true,

  that and an ugly history too. At least,

  in the South, the Ice Age never quite came.

  I can say that while glaciers scraped the North

  clean, here there was only a little winter.

  From the warm, deep dirt that remained,

  plantations’ fruitage grew.

  Then their produce, poverty. It’s still fresh.

  But a great diversity survived,

  of animal species, I mean. Our mud is home

  to half the mussels on the continent.

  Those fine beings filter tainted water.

  While the country’s sole cave fish swims

  unbiased nearby, with no color,

  no eye.

  MOTIONLESS

  In the photos of Sherman’s March—no action.

  Cameras could not yet capture

  subjects in motion. No battles, just battlefields,

  landscapes after. Trees, bark blasted off,

  burned bridges and barriers overcome.

  Broad strokes of blackened fields, sweeping

  the eye from the small interjections of fallen fence

  and fireplace, standing alone, to disappearing points,

  detail broken down in the indiscriminate texture

  of rubble and wreck.

  For film to register faces, people had to keep still

  so long they wore iron neck braces,

  not to tremble and blur the picture. Bodies

  gun-shot didn’t pose such a problem,

  and must have piled themselves before the photographer.

  But how hopeless the honesty of showing the dead,

  when, in a composition, trees can function as a frame,

  form a place where tensions are only between background

  and fore. And the shattered buildings, the splintered beams—

  they thrust up into the shape of branches, growing back.

  (after the photographs of George N. Barnard, photographer for General Sherman)

  ACCRUAL

  After the Civil War, painting the American West

  was popular because it was not the setting

  of either side’s tragedy. People thought they wanted

  to look at scenes free from the marks of our enemies

  and selves. But what man has ever really lusted for

  the untouched except in the briefest of moments before

  he lays his own hands all over it? Surroundings

  that exemplify purity are unsettled, empty.

  Eastern architecture’s crowded, old walls hold on

  to the curios of fondness, along with the clutter of anger.

  And, really, isn’t the woman most wanted she who remembers

  everything, who knows man’s faults, and will spoil him still?

  Spoil—that’s the word used for what builders of houses do

  to once-wild landscapes they admire too much to let alone.

  PRESERVATION

  Neon signs—why not care for them?

  They’re historic now. Businesses fail but

  the signs’ ideas endure far from the actual:

  Cleaning nowhere near the wringing

  of hands in the laundry. Repair

  with no wrenches in reach.

  These bent and soldered sales pitches,

  serenades of gas stations and seedy hotels,

  may lack the elegance of antique and artifact.

  But there are those who tend to

  the flickering of the familiar before it expires.

  Who exalt the dullard every day, ignite

  a No to go against the Vacancy,

  and live in that kind of light.

  THE JEWELS WITH WHICH TO MAKE DO, THE JEWELS THAT THERE WERE

  The woman is wearing, with such style

  and intention, only one earring—

  she makes the half lost

 
exquisite. Praise her.

  As we praise parks, what’s left of wilderness,

  and the literature of the diaspora.

  Give her the unmatched remainders

  of our pairs—one stud, one star, one single hoop,

  an actual diamond, antique,

  much iridescence, incomplete.

  Compliment her further by recalling

  that the forest was finest in its first growth—

  high canopies hung with the lobes

  of a multiplicity of leaves,

  chestnuts set in the prongs of pods,

  and below, made of birch bark’s silver

  and mud, a few homes

  built where their inhabitants belonged.

  Because it means you see what beauty is

  here, and what she ought to have:

  jewels in a complete set,

  presented in a box that opens

  to its landscape of velvet, opulent

  threads not yet asked to rise back

  from the crush of any touch.

  (for Tarfia)

  AMERICAN PERSIMMON

  I have tried to carry a persimmon home,

  to share one fruit. I passed the tree running,

  a pursuit which allows no pockets, no bags.

  Needs no equipment. No team.

  I was many miles away,

  and could not clench my fist.

  I told myself to hold my hands like good men

  every time they choose not

  to use their strength.

  But a good persimmon

  is already halfway to ruin.

  A ripe fruit falls,

  wrinkled and dark.

  Too fragile to bear reaching the ground,