Poemunity — your poem community

The others bent their heads and started in. Confused, I asked my neighbor to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl who brought raw milk to school from her family’s herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark, and on it Christ revealed his beating heart, holding the flesh back with His wounded hand. Ann understood division. . . . Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk and led me roughly through the class without a word. My shame was radical as she propelled me past the cloakroom to the furnace closet, where only the boys were put, only the older ones at that. The door swung briskly shut. The warmth, the gloom, the smell of sweeping compound clinging to the broom soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it upside down, and sat, hugging my knees. I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew from my piano lessons. . . . and hardened my heart against authority. And then I heard her steps, her fingers on the latch. She led me, blinking and changed, back to the class.

I got in the shower and burned my balls last Wednesday. met this painter called Spain, no, he was a cartoonist, well, I met him at a party and everybody got mad at me because I didn’t know who he was or what he did. he was rather a handsome guy and I guess he was jealous because I was so ugly. they told me his name and he was leaning against the wall looking handsome, and I said: hey, Spain, I like that name: Spain. but I don’t like you. why don’t we step out in the garden and I’ll kick the shit out of your ass? this made the hostess angry and she walked over and rubbed his pecker while I went to the crapper and heaved. but everybody's angry at me. Bukowski, he can’t write, he’s had it. washed-up. look at him drink. he never used to come to parties. now he comes to parties and drinks everything up and insults real talent. I used to admire him when he cut his wrists and when he tried to kill himself with gas. look at him now leering at that 19 year old girl, and you know he can’t get it up. I not only burnt my balls in that shower last Wednesday, I spun around to get out of the burning water and burnt my bunghole too.

On the porch, unbreeched shotgun dangling Across one arm, just after the killing, The murderer, Billy Winkles, made polite Small talk with my father while we waited For the sheriff to come. The reek of cordite Still loomed above the sheeted corpse, his uncle Ben, whose various dark and viscous organs Jeweled the lawn. “Want some coffee, Von?” I heard, and thought, A man is dead. And then: Why had my father brought me there to stand Alone, out of place, half-terrified, bored With the slow yammer of weather and crops? I stepped carefully across the rotted planks Toward an oak where an engine block Depended from a blackened limb and watched A dull dazzle of horseflies, a few puddles Hounds had dug like chocolate ruffles Hemming the chicken yard. “I told the son Of a bitch, come back, I’ll shoot you dead,” And he sure had, for sniffing round his wife. He said, “It just ain’t right.” He rolled A smoke and dragged a steady flame alive While neighbors shyly stomped from pickups And lifted the sheet to poke and peek. “That’s Ben,” one said. “That’s Ben to a T.” But was it? Was any of it real, the empty House, the creek? My father saying, “Now Your mother, she was a Partain, wasn’t she?” “Naw, she was a Winkles, too. My wife was A Partain, she’s over at Mai-Maw’s now.” It went like that, and this. The wind drove Up and set the shirts to popping on the line. A red tricycle leaned above a one-eyed doll. The mountain’s blue escarpment unwound Green bolts of fields, the white shelters Where we lived, all of it somehow wrong, And magical not to have changed while Trucks backed up along the ditch and men With their grown boys clambered uphill To gawk at Uncle Ben who lay like shortcakes Lined up on sawhorses on decoration days. How strange, I thought, that no one prayed, And strange that I was there, actually there, With grown men, not sad or happy, but proud, Knowing even then, the years would mostly Amount to sleep, my father would come back As history, and still there would be To say the strobe of the ambulance light; The sheriff, a tall, portly man, stooping To help the handcuffed killer into the car; And on the grass, bits of liver or spleen— Whatever I’d dream, the world is not a lie.

I do my best to keep pointlessness at bay. But here, wet above my knees, I let it fly. Here, hot and cold, fingers thick with thinking, I try to tie the fly and look for the net, loosening the philosophical knot of why I came here today, not yet knowing whether I’ll free or fry the rainbows and browns once they’re mine.

Our high school principal wagged his finger over two manila folders lying on his desk, labeled with our names— my boyfriend and me— called to his office for skipping school. The day before, we ditched Latin and world history to chase shadows of clouds on a motorcycle. We roared down rolling asphalt roads through the Missouri River bottoms beyond town, our heads emptied of review tests and future plans. We stopped on a dirt lane to hear a meadowlark’s liquid song, smell heart-break blossom of wild plum. Beyond leaning fence posts and barbwire, a tractor drew straight lines across the field unfurling its cape of blackbirds. Now forty years after that geography lesson in spring, I remember the principal’s words. How right he was in saying: This will be part of your permanent record.

Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American, For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must Think about everything; because that’s all there is to think about, Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy, Knowing intuitively how a sense of humor was a necessity For one and for all who live in America. Thus, natively, and Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began: Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European; Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between; Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing in his breast The infinite and the gold Of the endless frontier, the deathless West. “Both: I will have them both!” declared this true-blue American In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten, Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and Shining in the darkness, of the light On Saturdays at the double bills of the moon pictures, The consummation of the advertisements of the imagination of the light Which is as it was—the infinite belief in infinite hope—of Columbus, Barnum, Edison, and Jeremiah Dickson.

(The Homemaker of the Month) Ysidro calls me at night,meeya carra. his big blonde bean, and slides his moustache across my neck. he’s dark, and like I imagine his country, flat and arid, face a painted clay pot drying on the windowsill, on his lip, trails a snake with black twisted rattles. he asks me about my youth, and I tell him like the others, that they said I would never amount to anything. be cause of my size mostly, that I was a big American girl. raw and wide I sent away from catalogues, for plastic barrettes shaped like musical notes, and Cuban heeled shoes. I was dreamy too, and once painted my naked body like a guitar, with metal frets and silver strings. he caught lizards and tamed them, and saw an orange blister ripped sun. its aurora looked liked yellow music, and his eyes narrow as he plucks it from my stomach. I had Matthew from the first marriage, when I was sixteen. we would huddle in a striped mattress that was split in the seams, and I thought of my husband as a cowboy, when his leather face creased and stretched. in college I later learned about kings, and ancient gods who sent their love in showers of coins, golden, manna from heaven. and I never talk about my first man, except to say that he laid my head open and the scar-line is his illegible signature. my son is more like an immaculate conception, like my adopted girls whose teeth and pupils are shaped like a stranger. we ride to the lake and crush bread for the birds. I like the geese with their masks and giraffe necks. sometimes they hiss and you’d swear they had a row of devil fangs under their poniard tongues. but especially the swans, I can’t help but think of them plucked and fleshy turning white and velvet, like my husband pulling his hands through my henna hair. Ysidro is a groundskeeper and gravedigger. sometimes we joke about dead business or a certain shift, and we laughed about the recipe I have included; Mexican Chicken Bake, we said: cremate a handful of skinny bones, and sprinkle lightly over the dinner table. but it’s peaceful work, and he rests by the tombs, and weeds the paupers’ wooden crosses. and tells them about the weather, and here in Oskaloosa it couldn’t be finer. I am alone most nights when he walks with sleeping Iowa, and my imagination can turn black. I think of sewing him a pole-bag, with cobra skin and vegetable powder. with fathers and half shells. so he can speak melodic incantations and command a blood- less multitude. scary corpses turn to me, their eye sockets contracting in the light. we feed the birds and cook a chicken. in a taco shell it’s perfect, spicy and delicious, like my sweet Spanish lover’s touch.

When I say the ghost has begun you understand what is being said. That time is not how we keep it or measure first there was then wasn’t . . . It twitters and swerves like the evening news. Now outside is 3D. Inside non- representational space. Every law has an outside and inside I have witnessed cruelty break and gulp and sweat then punch out a smile. To be awake. This talking in space. To be absorbed in the ongoing. Belief’s a shadow to be looked into and into until relief is gone. The dark triangle settled in the midst of traffic is on us. Time comes in adverbial bursts, a glass of beer, a smoke . . . The evening air refreshes, startles, and the questions grow deeper like shadows across storefronts. A forsythia ticking against the dirty pane. This was time. Up. Down. Up. And you were a part of it. If I say it can you feel it now? Imagine. Lightning strikes. Rain falls and drives. Clouds pass. Night clarified. Stars. In silent pictures the tree falls in the optic nerve. The sound is chemistry. There’s no getting to it or if getting to it feels like the actual sound is that silence? Alone here with my shadows drawn . . . So what’s this about? A horse and a castle, a tree and its leaving? What’s this about in solitary splendor? The undertow and its threshold, a door and the opening sky? Or because a play of reflection lit up my bumper and caught my eyes I saw the shadow of a falcon. Because a sound a poor man uttered reached my ear I fell into song. If the syntax of loyalty is not tragic then what is the wager? If there were time, would it be ours?

Off rows of windshields in the Amtrak lot rain in sudden clumps like jacks. Parked cars with people in them awaiting people they imagine hurtling through suburbs of silver woods awaiting them. True love needs interference, a certain blizzard distance, for the words to worm through. Remember Iowa? August storms that would self-spark as if our fights could trip the finest wire beneath the sidewalk. And the sunlight, harder after.

No, no; for my virginity, When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die: Behind the elms, last night, cried Dick, Rose, were you not extremely sick?