Dimming of the Day
If you had left me in the waters
when the preacher lowered me down,
you could have been
saved by now, mama.
When you are under Mimosa,
white gown and prescription river,
dust of this in the low-country moss.
Have you sat before the gilt-frames
coated heavy, your mother and hers, too.
Eyes like stones underwater, carried.
The men sound like army trumpets,
sound like silver on navy starched.
The guests sound like hush, hush.
Your boys grew up as they did,
should have named your children
Magnolia, and Raleigh, and Gunpowder.
Never pronounced the maid’s name
right, never called her Starlight Cricketsong,
never pronounced “Bethena” without
a dam-slow drawl. Never saw flour
whitening her hands, second skin,
like a lady’s powder. Power
for free, for a price,
taken from the hand, kid gloves.
Your hands are pearl and sapphire,
hand-me-downs, I have your hands.
Peeled cuticles like
peeled sheets, trying to find
what your husband left there.
Ivory sheets, heirlooms.
Ivory teeth, good silver,
never a breast-milk moon.
And midsummer midnight air looms
like a third party, perfumes you
grass and guilt, out too late, but
the light doesn’t change.
You caught costume diamonds
in a Mason jar, sat naked
in their shine ‘till morning,
then drank them back to sleep,
whiskey of a lover’s shaking.
You could hear your parents
in the next room over,
whisper of a weeping
willow, if they make them
so ungentle. Your father
caught catfish in the French Broad,
your mother caught him
in the one down the road.
He caught glances from court-garden
handsome women, necks like marble
harps, cords taut. Pull.
You were tense unalone
and your brothers were like ghosts
of the uncivil war, you barely
heard their footsteps.
The undrained afterbirth left a ring
around the bathtub, did you
find your child in the waters.
Did you talk like playmates
with the cemetery stones
in your backyard.
Did they tell you how
to make moonshine
from blood and maple,
how to keep it secret
in the green-patterned noon,
in the stone-scent mountains.
You could have found
salvation there, buried
under old cold soil, red
white fingers dug in,
feet in the creek, blue bottom
like smoke of Grandfather,
clear like nothing.
You saw everything
from beneath the vines
and branches, theater
cast in green and shadow,
tasting like Cherokee Purples
and aversion, something like steel.
You heard stories from the mines,
conjured yourself a boy
charcoal dark, smelling like
homegrown, earth and sulphur
against early sunset, November.
He treated canaries like they’re gold,
knew they breathe like God,
like warning. He treated you
like honey in the hand, and spared
for Cheerwine, for flowered dresses.
The real one sounds like
the highway from a porchswing alone,
speed headed away. He has always
looked like hurl and shatter.
He’s curled up tight in your muscle
memory, he stretches as you lie
below the thick storm sky,
waiting for rain to beat you
waterless, to wet the ground
soft to embrace your body,
mold you into the soil,
into hurt before words,
like how the Cross of Calvary
thuds against the heart.
It sounds like screen doors
slamming loose, or the searching
raising churches. Remember
when your father came back
covered in nails and glory,
smelling like stories for kings
and the simple. Do you see that
there are words of Ezekial,
of Isaiah, and Jeremiah
written in roots of you. Do you
speak to Mary or your mother
when you wail beneath the willow.
The dust of pills and crabtrees
is not the dust of Jerusalem.
If you lie there long enough,
envisioning the fall, and mourning
for your cracked-glass daughter,
you will become your home.
The roots will take you into them,
pierce you through the side.
They will wrap you up
like remembrance of a rocking chair,
turn you back to new bones, baby,
cradle you. Lie beneath the willow,
mother, and let the wood
rock you saved before me.
**
The Sound of Roots
My room is the swollen eardrum of a shouting house.
Sometimes I wish my poetry could deafen me.
Layer on thick-coat heavy, a gaum of syllables
blood-clotted slick so the lawn-mower blades
of family dental records won’t scrape out
the meat of my fetal position. It is that blaring,
it is red.
We come from the mountains,
we have wolf in our blood, we have pine-barb.
It is cabin teeth, we have shotgun-cousins
and dirt-dress babies and when they holler
pitch-black in the woods, their maws are filled
with broken knuckles. There are Mason rings
in their molars. We have sold our molars for tar.
There is a snaggle-tooth in my eardrum. It belongs
to my great-great-grandmothers, who mixed scratch
with dried blood blessings and tried to stick
Eucharists to the ribs of their flour-sack children.
This is why we all grew up plump, this is why
I vomit out back behind the shed– so my mother
can remember the birch-branch ribs of her baby sister
who too often got caught in her father’s bear-trap
teeth, fly-hook hands. Seventeen years before
she would bear-trap a bullet into her cluttered-cabin
throat.
I am sorry, mamma, but some of her teeth
splintered into the walls of my bedroom, they are
the bones in my ears that vibrate to the landfall sound
of wailing. I used to believe my muscle memory
was learned through these grace-laced bones, all mine,
each curse a carving in my bedposts. But even this
bed is hers and my armored shoulders have hung
in our women’s closets for centuries, twitching
at the slamming of doors. They are quilts lain over
love-letterless chests and beaten in the winter to release
the dust then draped over our daughters as if to bury
them in heavy mountain snow.
But we are not as clean
as moonshine. When the folks in town spit our name,
it is a tooth punched from their gums by whispers.
Gapped sneers are clan insignia of rifle-rousers
drinking to the impact of recoil and the cum of myths.
So our fence is bricked with canines and we pierce
our daughter’s ears with incisors. Only the wolf-boys come
howling. Out back behind the cabin’s ears, there is a plot
of gunpowder earth and like damning a new-born’s
name into our family bible, we are each to lay a tooth
into a time capsule buried there so the screaming will never stop.
**
If I Go, I’m Going
after Gregory Alan Isakov
If I go, I’m going in the night.
I know where the floorboards creak; I’ll play only one.
If I go, I’m going North without a compass.
You can’t find me if I can’t.
If I go, I’m going into the forest.
I’ll blend in nightblue among the lace.
If I go, I’m going sharpening all my knives against hymnals.
Guardian of moss and deerflight.
If I go, I’m going with an empty stomach.
Packed full with traveller’s tools and dusty photographs.
If I go, I’m going without my skin.
I want the quiet creek winter to taste my nerves.
If I go, I’m going when darkness comes early, and wanting.
Everyone moves away, trying not to click in the cold.
If I go, I’m going without your mother knowing my middle name.
I know her quiet-step wariness, and yours.
If I go, I’m going with only a chisel and a quill.
If I can’t find paper, I have bones.
If I go, I’m going silently.
I lost all of my sound in your sock drawer.
If I go, I’m going with remembrance.
I’ll try to scrape it off on the trees.
If I go, I’m going without speaking to God.
God had rested where now is a book of lemongrass.
If I go, I’m going with an apology in hand.
If unfolded, you’ll find it says only “salvation” a hundred times over.
If I go, I’m going with your history leaked into all the rivers of my mind.
Too bad this doesn’t mean you’ve lost it.
If I go, I’m going with a cross-stitched womb.
The forest will make in me what you imagined.
If I go, I’m going on the tail-end of a ghost story.
The kind where only one survives.
If I go, I’m going without words.
I left my tongue in a time-capsule buried behind your house.
**
Where the Honeybees Hum and the Crickets Fiddle
I am in the forest staying human,
rain on my tin roof. Let me
fall to sleep to the sounds under
your still-lit door and your mumbled proverbs. Won’t you
bring me a drink? Tap it from the juniper hedges,
and my tall tales will smell like your land,
where you slipped yourself
out from the frame of your wooden keeping, and fell,
a metallic cut-out in a cemetery of trees,
clinking like a wedding car and with chattering teeth,
only rust around the edges to say you’d been
and gone. I know why you left
your silhouette alone in the woods, Tinman,
too slim for shadow. The blackbirds fly in and go missing
I need to reconnect my own lines to this hanging jaw;
blackbirds have been flying out.
We can tie them
to the clothesline out back, see if they chime together
in the right wind. See if I can still
wring some of my words out from their dark,
dark throats. Next time the moon is full
of maple, let’s sit below it and learn
how my own oils can make you move. Play me
a mandolin until its belly fills with rain and you
leave me rustred. Won’t you slowdance
for my water-heavy words? Oil me well, and deep
in the belly train-tunnel empty, ringing hollow
with your passing. It sounds like you have a band
of frogs alive in your chest; you sound like a monsoon.
Are you nervous? Your cheeks are a little pink,
and I can hear your fingers jingling
like the coins we’ve tossed at the stars,
now sleeping soundly at the bottom
of the creek. I knew I was a goner when
I watched you fish the soul of a man
from the river, two of our coins
wedged in his eye sockets. We know
his eyes were roaming down the waist of
the lowlands, resting where his mama’d
told him not look. Are you looking
there on me? Will it always feel like
quilted memory when you blush and raise
your eyes to the chimney-stone sky?
You were never supposed to find me,
wrapped in my riverbed in sheets of
cicada-song, sleeping to sound of lonely.
Don’t tell me fireflies led you here,
don’t tell me you followed a trail of smoke.
I know you came here to listen to my hinges
creek. I know you thought you’d find kinship
in my cold steel bones. You were right; I am
made of coal, but don’t you dare try to turn me to diamonds.
