Poemunity — your poem community

Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself get up, write it down, but it was late, and I was exhausted from working all day in the garden, moving rocks. Now, I remember only the flavor — not like food, sweet or sharp. More like a fine powder, like dust. And I wasn’t elated or frightened, but simply rapt, aware. That’s how it is sometimes — God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you’re just too tired to open it.

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

The idea was. At least in theory, Dust was a bad thing. There was a bowl Of it. At another Point in time The conclusion Was reached That everything Was of it. No season, no Nothing to measure To measure against So no love or hate. Left us without no Moorings or so my Father told me Vanity tables of it? Isn’t that what a vanity Table is for? What happens to As its failings accrue? No mission but to be clean. Of itself. But existing (time) And problems there – The problem of now We are back here. See the whole dust problem’s No measure. All’s dust, check. All’s virtuous, check. So why not live it up then? And thus, YOLO etc. etc. {These fok whirr pretty smart. Thing is, even in The dust bowl, the Idea, a very American One was that something Wasn’t dust. I wasn’t. The Bowl wasn’t. The dust wasn’t. Since Ecclesiastes, Been trying this one on. (how’s that working out for you?) One needn’t be geologically Or for that matter Psychologically trained to Begin unpacking the diffident And sometimes strained Relation the nation holds with All that is vanity.

Nevermind that keeping ashes on the mantel feels ghoulish, and comically impractical: not just another thing, a miniature memento urn, to dust, but dust to dust— I dread the conversational Hara-kiri, not,that’s what’s left of my brother, but,he died of suicide: the chasm of silence following the leap— so the cremains stay in the office closet till they migrate through no will of their own to a moving box I haven’t unpacked and likely won’t.

1. Footfalls on the brickwork road many fathers laid by hand and heavy mallet make a sandy sound. You can hear, in the dusted scuff, a kind of gasp as from the crumpled lungs of those bent double by depression, by wagonloads of work— you can hear huffs of hot wind kick the dust around them. You can feel the brickwork give. This is how the town found a way from starving. Three summers running: nothing but dust rained down to choke out cornfields and wheat. The council paid any man driven to his knees to lay a road from here to Cedar City to keep working. They tapped in bricks from the limekiln one season. They turned each one one-quarter twist the next. 2. All night, so far, I have waited for the train to come calling through a cotton curtain on its breeze. It always does—low as a mourning dove long minutes over the far, darkening fields and many trees. How huge the world must be to hear so far beyond the shade, beyond the grasp of night. There are apple boughs brushing my fine screen lightly. And a dozen stars, I know, like pinpricks on an arm. Before it stops, a train will hiss, grind, clatter all the way back while its car-locks bang. Then the engine at idle—hubbub, wood smoke, and trouble in the hobo camp below the trestle. How sad the world is to hear nothing for so long. It always comes. Sweet night wind like cider. 3. I was watching the road where his car went and thirty years burned off, as in a drop of oil. I was scanning for dust on the rise, a cartoon cowboy’s gallop. It’s where he drove each morning off to work somewhere hard with the road crew— he returned each evening, burned and hurt. I have a good life and hands too soft for labor. Who would guess it takes this long to come home? All week I have checked the old road, as if nothing had come to pass—jars of peaches pinging on the kitchen sill, her voice like silverware. I was playing with a soldier and blue truck. There’s a road to everywhere, the song sweeps on. I am watching the road where the car drove. 4. You can feel the brickwork give beneath your step. Each such shift in sand and balanced earth is kindred to the world’s intrinsic drift. Cars kick up a clatter, rumbling down the road— their tires grind brick to brick, turn dust to dust. When a truck goes by, the whole street quakes. You can feel your life begin to shake. 5. Hanging primrose breeze. Haze of barbeque. The many children quieted by baths, put to bed— they wait for the locusts’ buzz and homing trains. One lone bat recurrent in the streetlamp glow. Four blocks down the road gives way to asphalt blacktop. But here the block stamp macon brick hasn’t rubbed off the red clay bars the many fathers wrecked their knees to pack tightly back into earth. How small a world it is to want such work. I will come here only once more to lie down too, having lived to praise one thing made so well it sings with each slow passage, rimmed with sleepers safe in all their loved and many beds. Flowers line every sidewalk down the breathing road.

Every day a wilderness—no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knickknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life. Under her hand scrolls and crests gleam darker still. What was his name, that silly boy at the fair with the rifle booth? And his kiss and the clear bowl with one bright fish, rippling wound! Not Michael— something finer. Each dust stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom. Wavery memory: home from a dance, the front door blown open and the parlor in snow, she rushed the bowl to the stove, watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free. That was years before Father gave her up with her name, years before her name grew to mean Promise, then Desert-in-Peace. Long before the shadow and sun’s accomplice, the tree. Maurice. November 1981

Every day a wilderness—no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knicknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life. Under her hand scrolls and crests gleam darker still. What was his name, that silly boy at the fair with the rifle booth? And his kiss and the clear bowl with one bright fish, rippling wound! Not Michael— something finer. Each dust stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom. Wavery memory: home from a dance, the front door blown open and the parlor in snow, she rushed the bowl to the stove, watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free. That was years before Father gave her up with her name, years before her name grew to mean Promise, then Desert-in-Peace. Long before the shadow and sun’s accomplice, the tree. Maurice.

When he tells the story now he's at the center of it, everyone else in the house falling into the backdrop— my mother, grandmother, an uncle, all dead now—props in our story: father and daughter caught in memory's half-light. I'm too young to recall it, so his story becomes the story: 1969, Hurricane Camille bearing down, the old house shuddering as if it will collapse. Rain pours into every room and he has to keep moving, keep me out of harm's way— a father's first duty: to protect. And so, in the story, he does: I am small in his arms, perhaps even sleeping. Water is rising around us and there is no higher place he can take me than this, memory forged in the storm's eye: a girl clinging to her father. What can I do but this? Let him tell it again and again as if it's always been only us, and that, when it mattered, he was the one who saved me.

on a line from Szymborska My departure from the city of O.? I took no leave. I’d learned to sleep angry. On a train I was contained. The water under the bridge was just that. Shunned metaphor. It did not send waves of regret or make me reflect. It did not baptize, wash away, or cleanse. The countryside appeared like the sides of any country where rain falls and cows chew yellow flowers. The world was not too much or too much with me. I stomached it. In the photograph I only look lonely because I was alone. You cannot see the envelope on my lap or the letters lodged under sweaters in my suitcase. I carried only one bag, what I could manage in a crowd. You can imagine I held a thick book from which nothing could distract me. You can imagine my head high, eyes dry. I did not see my departure as a failure, or a fall. I’d dodged a bullet. Been reborn. You can imagine it that way. Only none of it was like that, not like that at all.

There’s blue, and then there’s blue. A number, not a hue, this blue is not the undertone of any one but there it is, primary. I held the bouquet in shock and cut the stems at a deadly angle. I opened the toxic sachet of flower food with my canine and rinsed my mouth. I used to wash my hands and daydream. I dreamed of myself and washed my hands of everything. Easy math. Now I can’t get their procedure at the florist off my mind. The white flowers arrived! They overnighted in a chemical bath and now they have a fake laugh that catches like a match that starts the kind of kitchen fire that is fanned by water. They won’t even look at me. Happy Anniversary.