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Dove-twirl in the tall grass. End-of-summer glaze next door On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree. Work sounds: truck back-up beep, wood tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn. History handles our past like spoiled fruit. Mid-morning, late-century light calicoed under the peach trees. Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here. The poem is a code with no message: The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath, Absolute, incommunicado, unhoused and peregrine. The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough From the cold waters of self-contentment we drift in One by one into its suffocating light and air. Structure becomes an element of belief, syntax And grammar a catechist, Their words what the beads say, words thumbed to our discontent.

I’m through! I’m through! she says and resays. The years pass. Her feathers gray. Her eggs lay themselves less frequently. The sky falls.

It’s like being lost in the forest, hungry, with a plump live chicken in your cradling arms: you want to savage the bird, but you also want the eggs. You go weak on your legs. What’s worse, what you need most is the companionship, but you’re too hungry to know that. That is something you only know after you’ve been lost a lot and always, eventually, alit upon your bird; consumed her before you’d realized what a friend she’d been, letting you sleep-in late on the forest floor though she herself awoke at the moment of dawn and thought of long-lost rooster voices quaking the golden straw. She looks over at you, sleeping, and what can I tell you, she loves you, but like a friend. Eventually, when lost in a forest with a friendly chicken you make a point of emerging from the woods together, triumphant; her, fat with bugs, you, lean with berries. Still, while you yet wander, you can not resist telling her your joke: Guy sees a pig with three legs, asks the farmer, What gives ? Farmer says, That pig woke my family from a fire , got us all out . Says the guy, And lost the leg thereby ? Nope , says the farmer, Still had all four when he took a bullet for me when I had my little struggle with the law . Guy nods, So that’s where he lost his paw ? Farmer shakes it off, says, Nah , we fixed him up . A pause, guy says, So how’d he lose the leg ? Farmer says, Well , hell , a pig like that you don’t eat all at once . Chicken squints. Doesn’t think it’s funny.

after Miller Williams This is to say we continued. As though continuing changed us. As though continuing brought happiness as we had known. On a dry field without cover, his skin blistered raw in the sun. Not one among us came, as though he had no relations. What did we say to our brother? How could we leave him alone while soldiers guarded his corpse as though precious to them? One of the women, in darkness, crept to the field where he died, prayed for him, covered him up. Dust over what was not dust. We would have ventured out with her if we had loved ourselves less. We had to think of our children, and he was not coming back. How could we live with the silence, live with our grief and our shame? Death did not heal what he suffered. He was making demands. We did not want him to be there, asking the question he asked us, changing the sound of his name. He had embarrassed us. This is the memory we carried, avoiding the thought that he remained face down among the charred grasses, holding the earth with his hands.

A woman ladder leans with her two-year-old boy in her arms. Her arms & legs & hands & feet are thin as crayons. The man ladder is holding his glass of bourbon, he is coming out of the child’s drawing in his old open pajamas— he’s in the war. The sky is blackest crayon-canyon. When does he leave again? When he leaves, I leave.          I like that river the sky.

A child is something else again. Wakes up in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words, in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm, instant light, instant darkness. A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet. They're training him to be a polite Job, to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given, to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away. A child is vengeance. A child is a missile into the coming generations. I launched him: I'm still trembling. A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence, kissing him in his sleep, hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles. A child delivers you from death. Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

Mother, the root of this little yellow flower Among the stones has the taste of quinine. Things are strange to-day on the cliff. The sun shines so bright, And the grasshopper works at his sewing-machine So hard. Here’s one on my hand, mother, look; I lie so still. There’s one on your book. But I have something to tell more strange. So leave Your book to the grasshopper, mother dear,— Like a green knight in a dazzling market-place,— And listen now. Can you hear what I hear Far out? Now and then the foam there curls And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s. Fishes and gulls ring no bells. There cannot be A chapel or church between here and Devon, With fishes or gulls ringing its bell,—hark!— Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven. “It’s the bell, my son, out in the bay On the buoy. It does sound sweet to-day.” Sweeter I never heard, mother, no, not in all Wales. I should like to be lying under that foam, Dead, but able to hear the sound of the bell, And certain that you would often come And rest, listening happily. I should be happy if that could be.

I worked the river’s slick banks, grabbling in mud holes underneath tree roots. You’d think it would be dangerous, but I never came up with a cooter or cottonmouth hung on my fingertips. Occasionally, though, I leapt upright, my fingers hooked through the red gills of a mudcat. And then I thrilled the thrill my father felt when he burst home from fishing, drunk, and yelled, well before dawn,“Wake up! Come here!” He tossed some fatwood on the fire and flames raged, spat, and flickered. He held a four-foot mudcat.“I caught it!” he yelled.“I caught this monster!” At first, dream-dazed, I thought it was something he’d saved us from. By firelight, the fish gleamed wickedly. But Father laughed and hugged me hard, pressing my head against his coat, which stank, and glittered where dried scales caught the light. For breakfast, he fried enormous chunks of fish, the whole house glorious for days with their rich stink. One scale stuck to my face, and as we ate he blinked, until he understood what made me glitter. He laughed, reached over, flicked the star off of my face. That’s how I felt —that wild!— when I jerked struggling fish out of the mud and held them up, long muscles shuddering on my fingers. Once, grabbling, I got lost. I traced the river to the marsh, absorbed with fishing, then absorbed with ants. With a flat piece of bark, I’d scoop red ants onto a black-ant hill and watch. Then I would shovel black ants on a red-ant hill to see what difference that would make. Not much. And I returned to grabbling, then skimming stones. Before I knew it, I’d worked my way from fresh water to salt, and I was lost. Sawgrass waved, swayed, and swung above my head. Pushed down, it sprang back. Slashed at, it slashed back. All I could see was sawgrass. Where was the sea, where land? With every step, the mud sucked at my feet with gasps and sobs that came so close to speech I sang in harmony with them. My footprints filled with brine as I walked on, still fascinated with the sweat bees, hornets, burrow bees; and, God forgive me, I was not afraid of anything. Lost in sawgrass, I knew for sure just up and down. Almost enough. Since then, they are the only things I’ve had much faith in. Night fell. The slow moon rose from sawgrass. Soon afterward I heard some cries and answered them. So I was saved from things I didn’t want to be saved from. Ma tested her green switch —zip! zip!— then laid it on my thighs, oh, maybe twice, before she fell, in tears, across my neck. She sobbed and combed my hair of cockleburs. She laughed as she dabbed alcohol into my cuts. I flinched. She chuckled. And even as a child, I heard, inside her sobs and chuckling, the lovely sucking sound of earth that followed me, gasped, called my name as I stomped through the mud, wrenched free, and heard the earth’s voice under me.

And now, Mistress Mummy, since thus you’ve been found By the world, that has long done without you, In your snug little hiding-place far under ground— Be pleased to speak out, as we gather around, And let us hear something about you! By the style of your dress you are not Madam Eve— You of course had a father and mother; No more of your line have we power to conceive, As you furnish us nothing by which to believe You had husband, child, sister, or brother. We know you have lived, though we cannot tell when, And that too by eating and drinking, To judge by your teeth, and the lips you had then And we see you are one of the children of men, Though long from their looks you’ve been shrinking. Who was it that made you a cavern so deep, Refused your poor head a last pillow, And bad you sit still when you’d sunken to sleep, And they’d bound you and muffled you up in a heap Of clothes made of hempen and willow? Say, whose was the ear that could hear with delight The musical trinket found nigh you? And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight Of this form (whose queer face might be brown, red, or white,) Trick’d out in the jewels kept by you?

When I was a child I knew red miners dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps. I saw them come down red hills to their camps dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines. Night after night I met them on the roads, or on the streets in town I caught their glance; the swing of dinner buckets in their hands, and grumbling undermining all their words. I also lived in low cotton country where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks, or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by; where sentiment and hatred still held sway and only bitter land was washed away.