A Saturday afternoon in Austin, in mid-March.
A dinner scheduled, a girl with colored hair
says she has enjoyed our conversation, and will see me soon.
A stack of books piled up to my knee,
and three hours to sit in the sun, if it lasts.
There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Over the chimneys a bank of cloud piles up; one flies overhead and I'm forced to reread a page gone grey.
A pinkness is rising in my arms, breast, ears,
and my sweat drips onto split pages.
I am wet like the drowned and my eyes sting.
A message from my sister informs me of another overdose.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.
A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now black as a cypress swamp.
Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
The water reflects a taut rope.
The water reflects a jail in the shallowest bend
that will one day be remade to stanch the water of poison.
Feet hang in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
Today, the very area dilapidates as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself.
A bandit, maybe, but loved by the poor, and now
lonely, at this end of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.
Years later, a plinth is laid
in the shadow of his piney feet,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the oar was broken.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle. Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart,
the best in the region.
Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes.
Where the boats took tar down to port, and money back
that no one ever saw.
Tar binds the heel but isn't courage.
Tar seals the hull -
sticks the planks -
made the roads.
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation.
Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.
Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Marlboro $22.50/carton
The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner. They pick clean the
vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.
Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A woman was set upon by an owl and cracked her head on the driveway.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
*I burn with the desire to leave.
The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the bored blood excited by opiates;
not the nighttime arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall rotting or the door of the robbed safe falling off its hinges;
not the chassis of teenaged cars gone high over the bump,
over the bend, plunging wide-eyed in the river's icy arc.
If you would like to understand,
look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear the shout of boys loosening a tire,
stuck in the gut of a dog.
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher, sharing the airwaves of country dark with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Drink this water, bitter as it is: and if they tell you that trees cannot feel pain, you will have learned not believe them.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.
Here in the city, a mute and pretty face makes a promise I see through a window. I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true, in this nation tied together with gallows-rope, with its codex of virtues.
First draft.
