Dave Smith

At dawn wind out of the north, hailflecks, pebbly skates against windows. I lie thinking the drainspout’s drip comes again in the basement faucet where I am crying, a child betrayed by death’s new cardinal and the cat yawning on the porch where my grandmother found me. Risen now, I see the river full-bodied, its white wind-knotted hair swirling like hers. The polar hickory is naked as a saber recalled by a girl long gone in the gold sauce of apples. Two leaves that might be cardinals returned tumble in the hard light at the brick fence. Nothing moves in boxwood where gray soldiers lie. Among the last of them she walked, cupping apples, staining her white frock, who took a boy far back into the haze the Shenandoah hills held where family stallions might walk aimless ground littered with purpling flesh beyond the cull of seasons. Through a gate nailed with leather belts in my mind, I pass and enter the arthritic orchard tended by widows. What I gather wakes me to think how bright on the tongue was the taste kept concealed, sustained, of flesh abiding, months beneath the wintering house floors. To reach this I must go down storm-worn stones and pick my steps past the sealed boxes of family debris, nightgowns, flannels, ribbons, birthspoons, a pair of dulled skates, flowers pressed in a moldy Bible. Why is it we keep what we cannot bear to use, and can’t escape, shoving ourselves into shrunken rooms edged with old foolishness unforgiven and unforgotten? I fumble to the center and pull a yellow light down the ancient string still dependably there and stand, in my head, as she did, playfully asking where they went. I know, I know, I say back there in the dust where I’ve come again to look through tiny windows into skirts of boxwood, a morning that sends me alive among gray soldiers at the house roots. I see also blue preserving jars full of slick pulpy flesh she has put up in a juice thick as blood. Behind it all in dark eaves, baskets of apples, split pine boxes like generations steeping, undisturbed by the tick and groan of housepipes veining the overhead I leave. Oh let me see her light bring back those stallion-feeders, little red handfuls of joy! Look how long I’ve slept, learning to walk straight into a dawn-silvered web where secret spiders spin ceaseless as the seasons. Above me ice takes each room, I can hear feet pacing fretful halls, yet here I lift my face and puff back all the silk in the world. I hold every core peeled on this slab. My fingers claw the meat of family stillness, parting all the way to seeds. Oh widows of the air, fill me with your cidery, useless lying, those bladed hours you fed me the dark rotting dreams of your love.

He can only drink tea now, screwed and filed. She is dead, in metal flecks. 55 years old and look like a bad nail by God they yanked me out I can tell you

There was a fire in the night. Across the street I slept among the others as the ashes snowed upon small pines. I slept owning nothing, a child ignorant of fortune’s blistering story, the playful flash in the dark, the unseen smolder that would leave us revealed, unchanged. I said my prayers for luck but the man trying to live in two houses answers me now, losing neither the old one whose windows burst with weariness, nor the one half-built whose roofless, green timbers he would leave unfinished like a vision. I had climbed there all summer to smoke. Awake, I found him sitting at his stool halfway between the houses where I would go each morning. The story of the sea would be upon his tongue, his hands weaving the wire to a trap, making the careful seams to catch a scuttling crab. Beyond him, his wife already had begun to stretch her wash, indifferent in that early light, and a dog lapped from the ruts of the fire truck. I believed little had been changed by fire, only his toolshed limp as a black sail left in a heap, and a new hole in the landscape. This was an old place where no one came, luckless, desperate, eternal as guilt. In silence I greeted that old one. But now I remember seeing also, as if for the first time, the shocking gray face of the sea. It loomed up human and beautiful as far off the figures of boats crossed, worked, and seemed to sink while they burned in the sullen sun.

for John Gardner It was not kindness, but I was only buckle-high in the door. I let him in because the knock had come, the rain clawed each window and wall. I was afraid. Climbing down the stairs I did not know how my country, cunningly, had rotted, but hear, now, my steps creak in memory and the rocks let go in the blind nightglass where you get up, frightened, to reenact the irrational logic of flesh. Even now I can’t see why it happens, the moment of change, but must try to witness each particular index of landscape and irony of promise. I know I was a child when the banging began, sleepless with every light in the house blazing. Then the man whose speech entangled me came in from the mud-world. He could not put together the clear words of hope we dream, only the surge of a river. He, who said it wasn’t a fit thing for anyone, half-grown, to have to imagine in this godforsaken life, said there was a message, the river high, no chance. I remember the wind at that door breaking like a father’s hand on my face. Such hurting does not cease and maybe that is why the man went on fumbling for love, for the loving words that might be knowledge. He gave me this message. I took it, and took, without warning, grief’s language that piece by piece has shown me how to connect dreamed moments skidding like rocks in the silence of a Wyoming midnight. Each of his rainy words, fragments of the old sickness, passed into me, then he was gone, miserable and emptied, and I had no home but the heart’s hut, the blistering walls of loneliness, the world’s blue skymiles of longing. Common with drowned fir and uncoiling crocus, then, I walked in ignorance and entered this terrible life that was always a dream of the future in the relentless unsleep of those who cannot remember the last thing they wanted to say: that love exists. And in darkness you have dreamed me into your world with their message, their words whispering an hour before black, sudden knocking that, even as I recall it, begins in your heart’s meat to reverberate, oh, its noise is going to wake you like a dove’s desire. This is the dream of the soft buckling of flesh, the beautiful last erosions, and I swear I would give up these words if I could, I would stop the code of that streetlight just beyond your bed— but it is too late, for the secret of hope swells in you and who can stop the news that already screams like the roof’s edge leaving its nails over your child’s bed that is, now, splintered and empty as every moment skidding at the back of your neck? Leaves not a month old hurl out of the storm and steady splatter of time, and tomorrow will lie still ripening, but only long enough for you to catalog, in dream, what was possible before the rake must drag its scritch-scratch over ground. All I ask is that you turn to the child inside, those words dreaming and changeless as love’s last chance—let them be said against whatever, crying in the night, we still think may be stopped, the black historical fact of life’s event crashing, like a wall of water, over the actuary’s lawn and yours. You have seen me before and would not hear, stung by your wife’s fierce beauty, when I called your name, and the day your mother died I begged your attention and got your dollar. I followed you once, in New York, like truth, always to give you the message, and now on your porch, mud-spattered, I am knocking to make you see what love is. Call your wife, the police, anyone you like, for everyone is waiting. We don’t mean to be unkind but are compelled to deliver, faithfully, the words that have been fluttering in your ear like a scream. It is not the wind waking you, but the low roar of years fumbling to tell you what has happened, or will, when the door flies open and the naked message of love stands there stuttering in your face, alive, crying, leaving nothing out.

Nobody knows exactly when it fell off the map or what the pressures were on its flooding river. The hedge, the tottering mailbox, were gone. That dimple of light from the bicycle that raised itself to creak at noon across a clattering bridge names my father. His blood silent as a surging wish drags this town lost through my body, a place I can get back to only by hunch and a train whistle that was right on time. But time and trains were never right in Green Springs, West Virginia. What color could map the coal’s grime, shacks shored against the river every March, mail left to rot because no one answered to occupant? Farmers low on sugar cursed the heat and left bad cigars boys would puff back to clouds where they dreamed of girls naked as their hands under outfield flies. Scores were low. There were no springs for the sick. Women lined their walls with the Sears catalog, but the only fur they ever had was a warbled rabbit. To get here think of dirt, think of night leaking, the tick of waterbugs, a train held in Pittsburgh.

... mindful of the unhonored dead —Thomas Gray Here they stood, whom the Kecoughtan first believed gods from another world, one pair of longjohns each, bad-yellow, knotted with lice, the godless, bandy-legged runts with ear bit off, or eye gouged, who killed and prayed over whatever flew, squatted, or swam. In huts hacked from mulberry, pine, and swamp cyprus, they huddled ripe as hounds. At cockcrow scratched, shuffled marsh paths, took skiffs and ferried to dead-rise scows, twenty-footers dutifully designed and of right draft for oysters, crabs, and croakers. They were seaworthy. According to diaries hand-scrawled, and terse court records, our ancestors: barbarous, habitual, Virginians. Some would not sail, came ashore, walked on the land, kept faces clenched, lay seed and family, moved often, and are gone. Of them this harbor says nothing. Of the sea’s workmen, not much, no brass plate of honor, no monument in the square, no square, merely the wreckage of a place. But they stood— proud, black and white, surly in mist at the hovel of the boatwright, arm pointed: Build me one like that yonder! Meaning the gray hull I see across a cove, bottom up, canting, nameless now as the hard, long arm, daddy’s or granddaddy’s, that points, but known to the one said to crush clams in his palms, thus got paid, always, who built the derelicts, and who, barring feud, took stick in hand here, made that grave gouged line of a keel, then his broad brow lifted seaward, in silence, sometimes summoning a shape in memory, and it hove up, and was changed some, they whined, but God knows all they wanted, all he made for them was to be a little unlike the drab hulls of the dead ones, but not too much. Like that one yonder! This was the image he gave them to dream of change, tomorrow only a guess, the sea’s story their life-stink and bow-slam and stillness, and they saw how the fair ones grew, quick riddle-riders our fathers feared, schools that gave us a message sewn on chest, Bible, slate, and this worm-holed future entered blindly as I now have entered his place, feeling for log-char, back-flung gates of light, and the builder. Like that one ... the lies begin, each inventing why he should rise up, he should hack out the joy they dream, his pitch boiled, black as mud seaming their legs. Suddenly, I see and take up a cap left as worthless on a stump, its stained round fitting my head like water. Merely to wait where the builder heaved shards and chips and abortive clots to the tide’s tongue-lap is to feel the unconceived shape pulse down his arm, into fingers that took up that stick to let loose the ingathered wilderness of dreams: loon, crow, osprey, gull, the man who cannot believe what he sees, but still sees it. An immense shadow making over water. Stick in hand, eyes squint. And there it is, the wind cradling of an Eagle, wing-sails, unfurled, bow-chopping white water head on, a creature now there, now gone. A man, I have to hold my face up, study how air heats, builds a rising push until the high circle of sight skids out everywhere. Dreaming change, I understand, almost, the problem: is he not harnessed, himself, this light flyer, this father designed to sail like a small god, to screech down upon pine-huddled, hungry chicks he must send off with his lethal, air-buoyed shape? Nothing in him asks what is over the wave-edge where our brothers float and sink, lovely shadows, by the millions. Putting my back to the sea-worn trunk they have left me, I pull the stick through the dirt, and remember the long line, man-weight in it, and dark-buoyed. It grows with freckling light, with the answering of birds crying out the only speech we all have above our unfinished country that looms still in the soul, that would bear us hence, out of the water that beats in, out of the water that bore us all here.

At the drycleaners I stand in line, my feet shuffling weight from side to side, impatience all over me while the woman, light brown, with her Creole story drones on. In New Orleans none would notice. She’s exotic in Baltimore, a dawn bird everything hears. Even the clerk leans into her tale, clucking softly. When people behind me cough, she won’t be rushed. She’s got her whole story to go. Soon there’s a man she never married, her mother opposed, far away still, and he went into a bar, wrong place, wrong color, wrong words, maybe, a good man. He’ll never come away of there, not comin’ home, geraniums on the back porch, and not replace the bad tire her Honda has, who could always be telling her what time does in the kitchen if she stand half naked letting his dog go on out. So let me pay you for him, give you money because you is nice and I remember, her nearly singing voice sighs. The sleeved pants, two shirts hang on the brass ring, all finished, unclaimed, the stiffened stains gone away. The perfectly starched cloth a redemption so beautiful it might be the linen of royalty, but small for a man two of us will think of as sleep scuffs house walls like tide under a boat. How nice they are, these women doing the little one person can for another which is, in the end, a wash of memorable words that leave you standing.

In her hand the knife, brisk, brilliant as moon-claw, shaves the flesh. It grazes the white belly just over the heart. Underneath, the coiled fingers are cradling a soft flesh as if it were the jowls of the aged man propped for a while on the bench in the park. The head is not severed, the eyes not out. Blue, they appear to flash odd ways where a tree makes a live shadow. Mostly the eyes are dead. Nothing is in them except the intense blue of sky the tree allows. There is no conspiring of nerves, no least event recalled by a limb’s high arching, or even a girl’s ascension from a forgotten distance of water. But there is something as she lifts the meat. It is enough to draw down her gaze. Now her arm rises against yellow hair fallen white in a childish face. She is still as a leaf barely clinging. I come to her like a cat in the stunned grass and touch her to see the startled, upthrusted gleam of her face. At brow and each cheek like gathered beads of mist scales leap with the sun, and are dead. No word passes between us, but something electric as a flash of steel makes her cry out just once. Squatting at the yard’s edge, she sings beyond any thought. Her knife flies as lethal as love and cuts quickly in like a hurried kiss.