Rodney Jones

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.

Gram of mania, animated pepper, shadow-monger dressed in panic, monitor of  ghostly footfalls, it concentrates in its essential tic the frog leg dropped into oil and the human shock at the verge. If  it would stop and let me look, I might imagine the tropic where it hangs in a hammock between two popsicle sticks admiring the iguana’s stealth, but it does not stop. Hawk- dodger, crow-pretzel, gallows’ twitch. Spider-shark. Porter of  readiness, miller of  the steady shudder, peripatetic rectitude, run by the power of   the sunlit rock, it fortifies Darwin and the idea of   being late and the missed appointment. With its blue tail, it reminds us: it will go on. It will not stop.

The front seats filled last. Laggards, buffoons, and kiss-ups falling in beside local politicos, the about to be honored, and the hard of hearing. No help from the middle, blenders and criminals. And the back rows: restless, intelligent, unable to commit. My place was always left-center, a little to the rear. The shy sat with me, fearful of discovery. Behind me the dead man’s illegitimate children and the bride’s and groom’s former lovers. There, when lights were lowered, hands plunged under skirts or deftly unzipped flies, and, lights up again, rose and pattered in applause. Ahead, the bored practiced impeccable signatures. But was it a movie or a singing? I remember the whole crowd uplifted, but not the event or the word that brought us together as one— One, I say now, when I had felt myself many, speaking and listening: that was the contradiction.

If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain, of waiting under the eaves of an old house at that moment when it takes a form like fog. It makes the mountain vanish. Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up, only condensed and refined. Almost fifty years since thunder rolled and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin. Brazil is where I wanted to live. The border is not far from here. Lonely and grateful would be my way to end, and something for the pain please, a little purity to sand the rough edges, a slow downpour from the Dark Ages, a drizzle from the Pleistocene. As I dream of the rain’s long body, I will eliminate from mind all the qualities that rain deletes and then I will be primed to study rain’s power, the first drops lightly hallowing, but now and again a great gallop of the horse of rain or an explosion of orange-green light. A simple radiance, it requires no discipline. Before I knew women, I knew the lonely pleasures of rain. The mist and then the clearing. I will listen where the lightning thrills the rooster up a willow, and my whole life flowing until I have no choice, only the rain, and I step into it.

It was a green barn coat from L. L. Bean That he had ordered, thinking of her Walking the snowy hillside of his dream Though she detested the style and color. That it arrived two days after he died Did not dispose her to detest it less Though she may have wished she did, The way she wished she’d kept house More neatly or baked instead of fried, For every coronary’s a latent homicide— If not what we did, what we did not do. If not what we said, what we did not say. In this, the inner jury’s always out, No different for man or woman— For everyone over forty, the human Condition is grief complicated by guilt. It’s unexceptional really, what’s left After deaths. We’re thrown back on our own taste. That coat, for instance. If that was a gift, She would have to hide to throw it away.

When the first mechanical picker had stripped the field, It left such a copious white dross of disorderly wispiness That my mother could not console herself to the waste And insisted on having it picked over with human hands, Though anyone could see there was not enough for ten sheets And the hands had long since gone into the factories. No matter how often my father pointed this out, She worried it the way I’ve worried the extra words In poems that I conceived with the approximate Notion that each stanza should have the same number Of lines and each line the same number of syllables— And disregarded it, telling myself a ripple Or botch on the surface, like the stutter of a speaker, Is all I have to affirm the deep fluency below. The Hebrews distrusted Greek poetry (which embodied Harmony and symmetry, and, therefore, revision) Not for aesthetic reasons, but because they believed That to change the first words, which rose unsmelted From the trance, amounted to sacrilege against God. In countries where, because of the gross abundance Of labor, it’s unlawful to import harvesting machines, I see the women in the fields and think of how, When my mother used to pick, you could tell Her row by the bare stalks and the scant poundage That tumbled from her sack so pristinely white And devoid of burrs, it seemed to have already Passed through the spiked mandibles of the gin. Dr. Williams said of Eliot that his poems were so Cautiously wrought that they seemed to come To us already digested in all four stomachs of the cow. What my father loved about my mother was not Just the beauty of her body and face, but the practice Of her ideas and the intelligence of her hands As they made the house that abides in us still As worry and bother, but also the perfect freedom beyond— As cleanliness is next to godliness but is not God.

I see the mosquito kneeling on the soft underside of my arm, kneeling Like a fruitpicker, kneeling like an old woman With the proboscis of her prayer buried in the idea of God, And I know we shall not speak with the aliens And that peace will not happen in my life, not unless It is in the burnt oil spreading across the surfaces of ponds, in the dark Egg rafts clotting and the wiggletails expiring like batteries. Bring a little alcohol and a little balm For these poppies planted by the Queen of Neptune. In her photographs she is bearded and spurred, embellished five hundred times, Her modular legs crouching, her insufferable head unlocking To lower the razor-edge of its tubes, and she is there in the afternoon When the wind gives up the spirit of cleanliness And there rises from the sound the brackish oyster and squid smell of creation. I lie down in the sleeping bag sodden with rain. Nights with her, I am loved for myself, for the succulent Flange of my upper lip, the twin bellies of my eyelids. She adores the easy, the soft. She picks the tenderest blossoms of insomnia. Mornings while the jackhammer rips the pavement outside my window, While the sanitation workers bang the cans against the big truck and shout to each other over the motor, I watch her strut like an udder with my blood, Imagining the luminous pick descending into Trotsky’s skull and the eleven days I waited for the cold chill, nightmare, and nightsweat of malaria; Imagining the mating call in the vibrations of her wings, And imagining, in the simple knot of her ganglia, How she thrills to my life, how she sings for the harvest.

The tortures of lumbago consumed Aunt Madge, And Leah Vest, once resigned from schoolmarming, Could not be convinced to leave the house, And Mrs. Mary Hogan, after birthing her fifth son, Lay bedfast for the last fifty-two years of her life, Reporting shooting pains that would begin High in her back and shear downward to the feet, As though, she said, she had been glazed in lightning; And also, men, broken on bridges and mills, Shell-shocked veterans, religious alcoholics— Leldon Kilpatrick, Johnson Suggs, Whitey Carlyle: They came and sat there too, leafing through Yellowing Pageants and Progressive Farmers; And, one by one, all entered in and talked While the good doctor gargled a dark chaff In his pipe and took down symptoms, Annotating them on his hidden chart— Numbness, neuralgia, the knotted lymph, The clammy palms—and then he’d scratch His temple’s meaningful patch of white And scrawl out his unfailing barbiturate prescription To be filled by his pharmacist brother-in-law Until half the county had gathered as in a lap— The quantum ache, the mutiny in every house. How much pain, how many diseases Consigned to the mythological, the dropped Ovaries, the torn-up nerves, what women Said, what men wanted to believe? Part of it Laughable, I know. Still I want someone To see, now that they lie safe in graves Beyond the vacant stores, that someone Listened and, hearing the wrong at the heart, Named it something that sounded real, whatever They lived through and died of. I remember Mrs. Lyle who called it a thorn in the flesh, And Mr. Appleton, who had no roof in his mouth.

Down the street, someone must be praying, and though I don’t Go there anymore, I want to at times, to hear the diction And the tone, though the English pronoun for God is obsolete— What goes on is devotion, which wouldn’t change if I heard: The polished sermon, the upright’s arpeggios of vacant notes. What else could unite widows, bankers, children, and ghosts? And those faces are so good as they tilt their smiles upward To the rostrum that represents law, and the minister who Represents God beams like the white palm of the good hand Of Christ raised behind the baptistry to signal the multitude, Which I am not among, though I feel the abundance of calm And know the beatitude so well I do not have to imagine it, Or the polite old ones who gather after the service to chat, Or the ritual linen of Sunday tables that are already set. More than any other days, Sundays stand in unvarying rows That beg attention: there is that studied verisimilitude Of sanctuary, so even mud and bitten weeds look dressed up For some eye in the distant past, some remote kingdom Where the pastures are crossed by thoroughly symbolic rivers. That is why the syntax of prayers is so often reversed, Aimed toward the dead who clearly have not gone ahead But returned to prior things, a vista of angels and sheep, A desert where men in robes and sandals gather by a tree. Hushed stores, all day that sense a bell is about to ring— I recognized it, waking up, before I weighed the bulk of news Or saw Saturday night’s cars parked randomly along the curb, And though I had no prayer, I wanted to offer something Or ask for something, perhaps out of habit, but as the past Must always be honored unconsciously, formally, and persists On this first and singular day, though I think of it as last.

Maybe a sin, indecent for sure—dope, The storekeeper called it. Everyone agreed That Manuel Lawrence, who drank Through the side of his mouth, squinting And chortling with pleasure, was hooked; Furthermore, Aunt Brenda, Who was so religious that she made Her daughters bathe with their panties on, Had dubbed it “toy likker, fool thing,” And so might I be, holding the bottle Out to the light, watching it bristle. Watching the slow spume of bubbles Die, I asked myself, could it be alive? When they electrocuted Edwin Dockery, He sat there like a steaming, breathing Bolt, the green muscles in his arms Strained at the chair’s black straps, The little finger of his right hand leapt up, But the charge rose, the four minutes And twenty-five hundred volts of his death, Which in another month will be Thirty-five years old. So the drink fizzed With the promise of mixtures to come. There it was. If the hard-shell Baptists of Alabama are good and content That the monster has died, so am I. I swallowed. Sweet darkness, one thing Led to another, the usual life, waking Sometimes lost, dried blood in the ear, Police gabbling in a strange language. How else would I ever gauge How pleasure might end, walking Past midnight in the vague direction Of music. I am never satisfied.