Nouns & Verbs Page 7
—SUSAN BRIND MORROW, WOLVES AND HONEY
1.
Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,
click of pearls upon a polished nightstand
soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music
distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull
of the self and the soul in the darkness
chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.
Deep is the water and long is the moonlight
inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,
building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.
Deep is the darkness and long is the night,
solid the water and liquid the light. How strange
that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.
2.
Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,
a warren of streets lined with dark cafes and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,
a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric,
a city of shadow-draped churches, of buses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.
Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,
or Madrid at 4 A.M., arguing The Eighteenth Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash can king of its Bowery stoop,
or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,
barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Murakami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,
the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,
always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.
3.
In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.
In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong.
In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.
In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.
In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.
In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.
In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.
In the night I will become an infant before your flag.
Part Three
Prose Poems
Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas
Now the light is brass and pewter, alloyed metals solid as amber, allied with water, umber and charnel, lucent as mercury, fugitive silver, chalk-rose and coal-blue, true, full of the skulls and skeletons of moon light, ash light and furnace light, West Texas whiskey light, bevel light, cusp light, light fall of arches and architectonics, earth light and anchor light, sermon light, gospel light, light that clasps hands with the few and the many, mesa light, saltbush and longhorn light, barbed wire and freight train light, light of the suffering, light of the dusk-fallen, weal light and solace light, graveyard at the crossroads light, flood light, harbor light, light of the windmills and light of the hills, light that starts the dove from the thistle, light that leads the horses to water, light of the boon and bounty of the Pecos, light of the Christ of Alpine, light of the savior of Marathon, Jesus of cottonwood, Jesus of oil, Jesus of jackrabbits, Jesus of quail, Jesus of creosote, Jesus of slate, Jesus of solitude, Jesus of grace.
Plums
I’m sitting on a hill in Nebraska, in morning sunlight, looking out across the valley of the Platte River. My car is parked far below, in the lot behind the rest stop wigwam, beyond which runs the highway. Beyond the highway: stitch-marks of the railroad; the sandy channels and bars of the Platte, a slow wide bend of cottonwood saplings metallic in the sun; beyond the river a hazy, Cézanne-like geometry of earthy blues, greens, and browns fading, at last, into the distance. Barrel music rises up from the traffic on I-80, strings of long-haul truckers rolling west, rolling east, the great age of the automobile burning down before my eyes, a thing of colossal beauty and thoughtlessness. For lunch, in a paper bag: three ripe plums and a cold piece of chicken. It is not yet noon. My senses are alive to the warmth of the sun, the smell of the blood of the grass, the euphoria of the journey, the taste of fruit, fresh plums, succulent and juicy, especially the plums.
So much depends upon the image: chickens, asphodel, a numeral, a seashell;
one white peony flanged with crimson;
a chunk of black ore carried up from the heart of anthracite to be found by a child alongside the tracks like the token vestige of a former life—what is it? coal—a touchstone polished by age and handling, so familiar as to be a kind of fetish, a rabbit’s foot worn down to bone, a talisman possessed of an entirely personal, associative, magical significance.
Why do I still carry it, that moment in Nebraska?
Was it the first time I’d been west, first time driving across the country? Was it the promise of open space, the joy of setting out, the unmistakable goodness of the land and the people, the first hint of connection with the deep wagon ruts of the dream, the living tissue through which the valley of the Platte has channeled the Mormons and the ’49ers, the Pawnee and the Union Pacific, this ribbon of highway beneath a sky alive with the smoke of our transit, the body of the past consumed by the engine of our perpetual restlessness? How am I to choose among these things? Who am I to speak for that younger vision of myself, atop a hill in Nebraska, bathed in morning light? I was there. I bore witness to that moment. I heard it pass, touched it, tasted its mysterious essence. I bear it with me even now, an amulet smooth as a fleshless fruit stone.
Plums.
I have stolen your image, William Carlos Williams. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold.
Rifle, Colorado
I doubt they were used to strangers in the Rifle Cafe, wrapping their sausage in pancakes a little after dawn. I think the earnest woman frying eggs and the girl in the cowboy hat tracing her finger through spilled flour were mother and daughter. I doubt the lined man drinking bourbon at the bar was either father or brother. I don’t know where the guides would lead their parties to hunt for bighorn and whitetail that day. I don’t know how often they came to the cafe, or what they thought about, or what they ate. I don’t know what their names were, where they lived, whether their families raised cattle or horses or stayed in bed in the morning.
I do know that there were cowboy hats and dirty orange workmen’s gloves, the coffee was strong, the pancakes were good, Main Street was gravel, the river ran by, the sun rose just as we got there, night left the Rockies reluctantly, snow and timber diminished in daylight, the mountains emerged slowly with dawn—high country in winter is beautiful and lonely.
West Virginia
Sitting alone in a bar in West Virginia watching Monday Night Football, I come to consider the beauty of bartenders and their metaphorical resemblance to angels. Today’s incarnation is Fallon, streak of white dyed in her jet black hair, now doing shots at the bar with Rick, her sometimes boyfriend, who loves above all else playing music, always at it, only missed three days of practice in the last two years and that to go fishing with his brother. Rick is learning funk bass to accompany the bluegrass guitar he cut his teeth on back home in Nashville, which explains why he keeps requesting songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Lord, nobody in the entire state of Tennessee but plays in a band, singing about lions and buried treasure and the sweet flesh of the beloved. Rick tells me he was born in 1984 and I tell him that in 1985 I saw the Red Ho
t Chili Peppers play these very songs at a club in New York City, a fact alluded to in a poem I read earlier this evening to a roomful of college students, many of whom, never having been to a poetry reading before, asked me as they exited to sign my name on their xeroxed programs, either to prove their attendance for extra credit or as if it were the autograph of a minor celebrity, a versifying Red Hot Chili Pepper descended from the library shelf. We are not far from James Wright’s hometown, which can no longer afford to celebrate its famous son with the touchingly sentimental Poetry Festival named in his honor, a literary event unlike any other in this country, held in the very library in which he discovered the books that enabled his escape from that town of retired factory hands on front porch lawn chairs, a town of abandoned mills and bars not unlike this one wedged between the railroad tracks and the Ohio River. A good-looking bartender is a dangerous benefactor, bestower of mercy and temptation in like measure. Mercy which may also be oblivion. Next week I’ll be sitting in a bar in central Europe drinking the local pilsner named after a golden pheasant, which I believe without ever having tasted to be delicious. Faith in the instruments and their servants, faith in good beer to come, faith that the Cowboys will lose, as they do, on a field goal in overtime. Draw a circle—whatever’s inside it is the poem. Everything else is the world. Keep drawing that circle larger and larger, keep going, keep going. This poem was written on the back of a Jack Daniel’s coaster at a bar in Morgantown, West Virginia, which may, after all, explain a few things.
Langdon, North Dakota
Just across the Red River of the North we pulled over at dusk to watch a farm auction near Langdon, North Dakota. Pickup trucks were parked for a quarter mile in either direction. Wind shook the waist-high grass and weeds, lifting conic sections of dust swirling into the white, slanting, late-summer sunlight. As we came into the yard crowded with farmers and farmers’ wives and children the family guns were on the block: shotguns, deer rifles, down to a bolt-action .22, “just right for a youngster.” By the barn, Charlie deciphered a family history in farm equipment: ’41 tractor, ’51 truck and spreader, ’72 tractor, ’78 combine—good times and fallow, all going. The auctioneer was a friend from the next county, and the women laughed softly at his jokes, self-consciously, caught somewhere between a wake and a square dance, while the farmers smiled, then gazed off into the trees as if listening to the wind. It was a wind that pulled the auctioneer’s words from his mouth and left him working his jaws broadly and soundlessly, a gray-haired man in a cowboy hat waving his arms while the buzz of grasshoppers from the endless fields and the noise of thrashing leaves roared and roared. It was a dry, hard wind that blew until it was the sound of the citizens of Langdon singing hymns in the one-story Lutheran church at the edge of town, as their forebears had offered up prayers of thanks a hundred years earlier at the first sight of the borderless grasslands, moving west in the curl of the great human wave of migration, Swedes and Norwegians off the boats from Oslo or Narvik or Trondheim, sent out by train to the home of relatives in Chicago—an uncle whose pickling plant already bore the promise of great wealth—and onward, north and west, some falling out among the prosperous lakes of Wisconsin, the meadows and pinewoods of Minnesota, the white birch forests like home and the green hills like heaven, through the last of the moraine and glacial defiles, across the lithe Mississippi and into the edge of the vast prairie, the Great Plains of North America still raw with Sioux and locust plagues, the last massive buffalo hunts flashing in the hills of Montana no more than a generation gone, the Arctic wind massing a thousand miles to the north and barreling down the continent, along the width and breadth of grass, the Dakotas, Nebraska, sod and wild flax in spring, limitless land, a place to plant and sow that neither Indians nor winters fierce as Stockholm’s nor the virulent range wars could take away from the Vorlegs and Johannsens and Lindstroms, a tide of settlers moving out across the heartland, naming lakes for Icelandic heroes, founding towns like Fertile and Walhalla, islands in the great grass delta. It was the sweet wind of Capitalism in the inland Sargasso.
The auction began at noon, was almost over when we arrived. Gone already were the canoe, wading pool, camper, motorcycles, lawn furniture, toys, old clothes, the house, the land itself. Through the window I could see a stag’s head over the mantel. Charlie’s boots were thick with dust. As we left they were auctioning off an artificial Christmas tree, a last-ditch offering from Sears or Woolworth’s. “A real handy article, folks, only gotta wait four months to get your money’s worth—do I hear a dollar, do I hear four bits?”
It is nearing the day the smiling auctioneer spoke of, that promised Christmas, a season of hope and redemption. I have carried the draggled plastic tree across the continent and back in my heart. I have felt the silvered needles sting, heard them rustle in the glow of blinking Christmas lights like wheat fields in the first wind of autumn. It is a wind which carries the seeds of life and the dust of extinction. I have dreamt of tinsel and glass balls, of a living room in the heart of the Great Plains. It is a winnowing wind. It is a bitter wind.
Delphos, Ohio
is where we turned around, surrendered to fate, gave in to defeat and abandoned our journey at a town with three stoplights, one good mechanic, and a name of possibly oracular significance.
Which is how we came to consider calling the baby Delphos.
Which is why we never made it to Pennsylvania, never arrived to help J.B. plant trees on the naked mountaintop he calls a farm, never hiked down the brush-choked trail for groceries in the gnomic hamlet of Manns Choice, never hefted those truckloads of bundled bodies nor buried their delicate rootling toes in the ice and mud of rocky meadows.
Blue spruce, black walnut, white pine, silver maple.
And that name! Manns Choice. Finger of individual will poked in the face of inexorable destiny.
Which is how we came to consider calling the baby Hamlet, Spruce, or Pennsylvania.
But we didn’t make it there. Never even got to Lima or Bucyrus, let alone Martins Ferry, let alone West Virginia, let alone the Alleghenies tumbled across the state line like the worn-out molars of a broken-down plow horse munching grass in a hayfield along the slate-gray Juniata.
Because the engine balked.
Because the shakes kicked in and grew like cornstalks hard as we tried to ignore them, as if we could push that battered blue Volvo across the wintry heart of the Midwest through sheer determination.
Which is foolish.
And the man in Delphos told us so.
Fuel injector, he says. Can’t find even a spark plug for foreign cars in these parts. Nearest dealer would be Toledo or Columbus, or down the road in Fort Wayne.
Which is Indiana. Which is going backwards.
Which is why they drive Fords in Ohio.
Which is how we came to consider calling the baby Edsel, Henry, Pinto, or Sparks.
Which is why we spent the last short hour of evening lurching and vibrating back through those prosperous bean fields just waiting for spring to burst the green-shingled barns of Van Wert County.
Which is how we came to consider calling the baby Verna, Daisy, Persephone, or Soy.
By this time we’re back on the freeway, bypassing beautiful downtown Fort Wayne in favor of the rain forest at Exit 11, such is the cognomen of this illuminated Babel, this litany, this sculptural aviary for neon birds, these towering aluminum and tungsten weeds,
bright names raised up like burning irons to brand their sign upon the heavens.
Exxon, Burger King, Budgetel, Super 8.
Which is how we came to consider calling the baby Bob Evans.
Which is how we came to consider calling the baby Big Boy, Wendy, Long John Silver, or Starvin’ Marvin.
Which is how we came to salve our wounds by choosing a slightly better than average motel, and bringing in the Colonel to watch Barnaby Jones while Elizabeth passes out quick as you like
leaving me alone with my thoughts and reruns
in t
he oversized bed of an antiseptic room on an anonymous strip of indistinguishable modules among the unzoned outskirts of a small Midwestern city named for the Indian killer Mad Anthony Wayne.
Which is why I’m awake at 4 A.M. as the first trucks sheet their thunder down toward the interstate.
Which is when I feel my unborn child kick and roll within the belly of its sleeping mother, three heartbeats in two bodies, two bodies in one blanket, one perfect and inviolable will like a flower preparing to burst into bloom,
and its aurora lights the edge of the window like nothing I’ve ever seen.
A Dove
If May is the month of the mockingbird, September is the season of the dove. On the roof they have gathered to drink from warm puddles of yesterday’s rainwater, preening and cooing in the shade, while their brothers the pigeons line the telephone wires in radiant sunshine, waiting for their daily feed to spill forth from Mr. Johnson’s sack of seed and cracked corn. Sunday morning, 10 A.M. High African clouds in the west, allamanda spilled in yellow spikes and coils across the fence. In the backyard: a neighbor’s cat. At the sound of the opening window it flees, startled, then hesitates at the top of the wall to glance back—at what?—and as my eye tracks its gaze I catch a sudden motion in the overgrown grass, frantic circling too big for a lizard, too desperate, and even as I notice it and begin to speak, even as I call out Hey, come see something strange in the yard I realize, in that instant, what it must be—a bird, mauled, its weary struggle for survival—and wish I could unsay it, wish I could avert the gaze of my conscience because already I foresee the morning slipping away—a box, a warm towel, a bowl of water, and the calls to the Humane Society, and the drive to Fort Lauderdale to tender its fragile body to the wild animal hospital, a shaded compound of blackbirds and parrots, box turtles and one-eared rabbits—and now Sam has come over to watch with me and I cannot will away the obvious, and he dashes out the back door to investigate, and now the day has been taken from us, seized, wrenched away, a day of rest I would covet even against that ring of blood and spilled feathers, the slender broken bones in the lawn, and now we are drawn into the circle of its small life, obligated by our witness, impossible to deny or retract, committed long before the dull slow course of a thought can be born into language, before the image is set into words, as Sam’s words come to me now across the hot summer grass: Dad, it’s alive. A kind of bird. It’s hurt. A dove.