Poemunity — your poem community

1 One night in April or May, his daughter saw someone's hand make the curtain which was drawn tightly across her window bulge and ran to the adjoining room in her night clothes where he and his son were sitting. He ran around the house one way and his son ran the other way and they found a Negro under a workbench within six or eight feet of the window holding a piece of plank before his face— begging them not to shoot. 2 The Negro was dead when the doctors examined him. They found upon his belly bruises: he died, the doctor said, of peritonitis. The jailer testified that the Negro had been brought to the jail charged with burglary; but no warrant for his arrest was produced and the jailer did not know—or tell— who brought him. The Negro said that a crowd of men had taken him from a store to the woods and whipped him with "a buggy trace." He was not treated by a doctor, the jailer, or anybody: just put into the jail and left there to die. The doctor who saw him first—on a Monday— did nothing for him and said that he would not die of a his beating; but he did die of it on Wednesday.

But whose did? She’s crumpled where she’s supposed to be unfolded, something bad written on a piece of paper. Her walking is a devolution that hunches and shrinks everyone as she moves up the tree-lined street. I’m on my porch waving to my neighbors and having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don’t know who I am. I know everything else, though, and it’s ringing in my head. Then there she is in a pool on my front steps, laughing, asking about lunch, as if the bones of at least four different animals weren’t loose inside her, scurrying this way and that. Someone needs to find her a place to live, a hidey hole we can cram food in and get away from quickly. We could call her part bird and be done with it. But everyone is dying right under the surface these days, especially around the eyes. Death has crawled up into the face to nibble away whatever blocks its view of the stars. We’re riddled with it. It’s pulling our flesh into outrageous, unwilled positions, like the huge smile on my face as I lift her onto my lap and hold her together for a minute before I tell her she isn’t welcome here.

They live alone together, she with her wide hind and bird face, he with his hung belly and crewcut. They never talk but keep busy. Today they are washing windows (each window together) she on the inside, he on the outside. He squirts Windex at her face, she squirts Windex at his face. Now they are waving to each other with rags, not smiling.

All afternoon his tractor pulls a flat wagon with bales to the barn, then back to the waiting chopped field. It trails a feather of smoke. Down the block we bend with the season: shoes to polish for a big game, storm windows to batten or patch. And how like a field is the whole sky now that the maples have shed their leaves, too. It makes us believers—stationed in groups, leaning on rakes, looking into space. We rub blisters over billows of leaf smoke. Or stand alone, bagging gold for the cold days to come.

Dazed with rambling gossip, their looming net of mistakes, their love of rumor, they all dream arousal. They are far from indifferent. Their language bellows need. A gull darts over and behind bare buildings, shaggy forests, mountains, city streets. Trees lose leaves, and one man insists the leaves aren’t dying after collecting outdated food at church, upswing in full euphoric force, he’s certain he’s spreading world peace. Men at work lumber to dumpsters. Oaks yellow. Rocks trap leaves. Jehovah’s Witnesses mouthed salvation. Janice listened wishful, but today she relays her own bitter story: lazy sister-in-law fat on a couch, quarter-sized bedsores on her ass, brother-in-law blind, stumbling drunk. Hearts rigid and numb, neighbors forget crepe myrtle blooming pink. Impermanent and frenetic worry hums. Eyes grow glaucoma blue. Sucking cigarettes and mumbling, they stand hardy as an autumn day’s geraniums, hard before winter.

In the woods at the corner of our yards we hang the plywood squares, the Magic Marker images of pronghorn, panther, grizzly, whitetail, and step off the paces we use to measure our skill. Here in the soft light filtering through needles and cones, green shifting membrane of poplar, hickory, live oak, white skin of dogwood beginning to flower, we heft the blades, grind points on stone, gauge the fine balance between what is real and what is imagined, the knives bringing all the animals to life and killing them again as our throws bury steel deep in the heart of the quivering wood and the blades tremble back through their bones. In our own hearts we love what they might be, their shapes frozen in brush as though, suddenly, they had turned from wood and caught our scent drifting in a wind-shift. So we hunt this suburb, whet our aim to move among them in the little wilderness beyond the bricked-in beds of azaleas, sunflowers tied against tall sticks, the half-acres of razored grass, trellised vines, boxwoods manicured by wives.

I was only eight years old; And before I grew up and knew what it meant I had no words for it, except That I was frightened and told my Mother; And that my Father got a pistol And would have killed Charlie, who was a big boy, Fifteen years old, except for his Mother. Nevertheless the story clung to me. But the man who married me, a widower of thirty-five, Was a newcomer and never heard it Till two years after we were married. Then he considered himself cheated, And the village agreed that I was not really a virgin. Well, he deserted me, and I died The following winter.

The old men with too much gamble in them, whose eyes Are at peace only when all is lost, see the Queen's quiet face On the deck of cards, the red cuff of  her cloak, the raw tip Of  her tongue, the blood on her dress    . . .    What fled from them In their frenzies comes tiptoeing back, choiring, to the marble Concert hall where Nemesis, in velvet opera cape, is beginning Her recitative:it is your turn to go slowly now,with hands clasped behind your back,drowsy from the earth's sweet abundance and her great deprivations,the rows of crooked trees, the streets' bright monotony, and gather up the starving. . .

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want him for long.

Snow everywhere, like the salt electrons jump from, as gas snaps and the tube hisses with light. I am holding just now the hooked underbeak of the great flamingo: cool glass, a little dusting of phosphor. Just off through the tree-line, the New Year waits with its bells, as in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, stretched thirty feet up to the promenade deck, the back-kneed, S-necked mate waits with its own ringing, its soft, rattle-whistle of argon. What a pair they will make: ice-pink tubeworks north and south on the ballroom floor. And below: foxscarves, carnations, the pull and push of the long trombones. Flamingos! And now the moon pressing back through the tree-line. Close your eyes. Let us say we are children together, ten, perhaps twelve. I see neon: a steadfast landscape of DEPOT, HEIDELBERG, VACANCY. And you? Women in cardigans? A certain leaf tree? Perhaps the gleam of your dress shoe as you welcome the New Year. The ballroom is thick with smoke and laughter. Two birds, of course, north and south. Then the catch in your breath as an uncle explains the impact of vapor and salt, how a light that has never been curls up through the century—swank, incredibly still. Our times , he laughs, and in from the thin roadways all the WELCOMES, the PALMISTS and EXITS, all the boneworks blown to their plush, just bearable tones curl up to a wing and S-neck. High above you, cupped left, right on the ballroom floor, that ice-pink, still parenthesis. Then foxscarves. The flick of the black shoes.