pushing
Like a small man entering a big woman.
4 Soft Touch
Men came to her back door & knocked.
Food was the password. When switch engines
Stopped & boxcars changed tracks
To the sawmill, they came like Gypsies,
A red bandanna knotted at the throat,
A harmonica in the hip pocket of overalls
Thin as washed-out sky. They brought rotgut
Drought years, following some clear-cut
Sign or icon in the ambiguous
Green that led to her back porch
Like The Black Snake Blues.
They paid with yellow pencils
For crackling bread, molasses, & hunks
Of fatback. Sometimes grits & double-yolk
Eggs. Collard greens & okra. Louisianne
Coffee & chicory steamed in heavy white cups.
They sat on the swing & ate from blue
Flowered plates. Good-evil men who
Ran from something or to someone,
A thirty-year headstart on the Chicago hawk
That overtook them at Castle Rock.
She watched each one disappear over the trestle,
As if he’d turn suddenly & be her lost brother
Buddy, with bouquets of yellow pencils
In Mason jars on the kitchen windowsill.
5 Shotguns
The day after Christmas
Blackbirds lifted like a shadow
Of an oak, slow leaves
Returning to bare branches.
We followed them, a hundred
Small premeditated murders
Clustered in us like happiness.
We had the scent of girls
On our hands & in our mouths,
Moving like jackrabbits from one
Dream to the next. Brandnew
Barrels shone against the day
& stole wintery light
From trees. In the time it took
To run home & grab Daddy’s gun,
The other wing-footed boys
Stumbled from the woods.
Johnny Lee was all I heard,
A siren in the flesh,
The name of a fallen friend
In their wild throats. Only Joe
Stayed to lift Johnny’s head
Out of the ditch, rocking back
& forth. The first thing I did
Was to toss the shotgun
Into a winterberry thicket,
& didn’t know I was running
To guide the paramedics into
The dirt-green hush. We sat
In a wordless huddle outside
The operating room, till a red light
Over the door began pulsing
Like a broken vein in a skull.
6 Cousins
Figs. Plums. Stolen
Red apples were sour
When weighed against your body
In the kitchen doorway
Where late July
Shone through your flowered dress
Worn thin by a hundred washings.
Like colors & strength
Boiled out of cloth,
Some deep & tall scent
Made the daylilies cower.
Where did the wordless
Moans come from in twilit
Rooms between hunger
& panic? Those years
We fought aside each other’s hands.
Sap pulled a song
From the red-throated robin,
Drove bloodhounds mad
At the edge of a cornfield,
Split the bud down to hot colors.
I began reading you Yeats
& Dunbar, hoping for a potion
To draw the worm out of the heart.
Naked, unable or afraid,
We pulled each other back
Into our clothes.
7 Immigrants
Lured by the cobalt
Stare of blast furnaces,
They talked to the dead
& unborn. Their demons
& gods came with black rhinoceros powder
In ivory boxes with secret
Latches that opened only
Behind unlit dreams.
