James Kimbrell

It’s not that I harbor a weeping willow Shadow’s worth of longing for those cloaked Turns and straight-aways, or that swampy South Mississippi was ever half as tragic As I dreamed it could be, but that I still cruise From time to time in the dope-ripe Ford Fairlane of the mind where nothing Has changed, where we remain hopelessly Stoned devotees of the TOWN OF LEAKESVILLE Emblazoned upon the graffitied water tower’s Testimonies to love. We believed speed Would save us, would take us fast And far away from the junkyard wrecks Stacked in their mile-long convoy to nowhere. And though losing the way should Have seemed the worst of divine betrayals, We took it as a minor fall from grace, Tail-spun over the embankment rail, rocking That flung steel body down as if to play A bar-chord on the barbed-wire fence. I’ll never know what angelic overseer Was bored and on duty that night, but we Rose up and climbed out of the warped last Breath of that car, no one with so much As a scratch on his head, not a drop Of beer spilt, and the radiator hissing Like a teapot in hell when someone yelled She’s gonna blow! and each of us standing There, starving for something more, Something other than the black wheel Spinning that sudden dark, cricketed quiet.

If I eat a diet of rain and nuts, walk to the P.O. in a loincloth, file for divorce from the world of matter, say not-it! to the sea oats,not-it! to the sky above the disheveled palms,not-it! to the white or green oyster boats and the men on the bridge with their fishing rods that resemble so many giant whiskers, if I repeat this is not it, this is not why I'm waiting here, will I fill the universe with all that is not-it and allow myself to grow very still in the center of this fishing town in winter? Will I look out past the cat sleeping in the windowsill and say not-it! garbage can, not-it! Long's Video Store, until I happen upon what is not not-it? Will I wake up and BEHOLD! the "actual," the "real," the "awe-thentic," the IS? Instead I walk down the Island Quicky, take a pound of bait shrimp in an ice-filled baggie, then walk to the beach to catch my dinner. Now waiting is the work I'm waiting for. Now the sand crane dive-bombs the surf of his own enlightenment because everything is bait and lust and hard-up for supper. I came out here to pare things down, wanted to be wind, simple as sand, to hear each note in the infinite orchestra of waves fizzling out beneath the rotting dock at five o'clock in the afternoon when the voice that I call I is a one-man boat slapping toward the shore of a waning illusion. Hello, waves of salty and epiphanic distance. Good day, bird who will eventually go blind from slamming headfirst into the water. What do you say fat flounder out there deep in your need, looking like sand speckled with shells, lying so still you're hardly there, lungs lifting with such small air, flesh both succulent and flakey when baked with white wine, lemon and salt, your eyes rolling toward their one want when the line jerks, and the reel clicks, and the rod bends, and you give up the ocean floor for a mouthful of land.

Let it be said that Tim's year was divided into two seasons: sneakers and flip-flops. Let us remember that Tim would sometimes throw a football with all the requisite grip, angle and spiral-talk. Let us recall that for the sake of what was left of appearances, my mother never once let him sleep in her bed; he snored all over our dog-chewed couch, and in the mornings when I tip-toed past him on my way to school, his jowls fat as a catcher's mitt, I never cracked an empty bottle across that space where his front teeth rotted out. Nor did I touch a struck match to that mole by his lip, whiskery dot that—he believed—made him irresistable to all lovelorn women. Still, let us remember sweetness: Tim lying face down, Mom popping the zits that dotted his broad, sun-spotted back, which, though obviously gross, gets the January photo in my personal wall calendar of what love should be, if such a calendar could still exist above my kitchen table junked up with the heretos and therefores from my last divorce. Let us not forget how my mother would slip into her red cocktail dress and Tim would say, "Your mother is beautiful," before getting up to go dance with someone else. In fairness, let me confess that I pedaled my ten-speed across the Leaf River bridge all the way to Tim's other woman's house and lay with that woman's daughter beside the moon- cold weight of the propane tank, dumb with liquor, numb to the fire ants that we spread our blanket over until I stopped for a second and looked up because I wondered if her mother could hear us, or if Tim might not have stood in the kitchen, maybe looked out the window and saw my white ass pumping in the moonlight, and whispered to himself, "That's my boy."