death be not incarnate

Here starts some posts in which I share previously published poems which have only appeared in print until now.

Death Be Not Incarnate

Death be not incarnate.  Be proud as you will

But not with puffed chest or fanned plumage.

Carry no sickle across the threshold, be no

Pestering crow.  Death do not assume

A shadowy form.  Do not even reek of anything—

Neither pleasant nor foul.  Be terrifying

As you will, but be so invisibly.  Silently.

Odorless as the soul.  To come in the flesh

Would be obnoxiously rude.  To mock the systems

Of solid biology.  You are circulatory already,

Digestive enough as things are.  Leave endocrine

And arteries alone.  Leave us our defecations.

Breathe not icy breath.  Whisper not dooms,

Tickling ears.  Slink and steal, as you will—

Leave a wake of carnage but be not incarnate.

You have emissaries aplenty.  Ambassadors

Wrought of real stuff.  They are the flatline

On the vitals screen, the blooming celosia

On the shirt of the bullet-shot.  They are the chalk

Outlines of defenestrated discontents,

They are cross and chair and needle.

So Death be proud—you’ve earned your laurel,

Outpaced our pumping organs.  Only spare us

Your hooded robe.  Leave us our carbon copies.

 (first published in The Louisville Review No. 72, Fall 2012)

in the aftermath

On the 27th of April, a violent storm plowed a massive swath of destruction across the the Southeast. The cost in life is unspeakable, the cost in property is incalculable. The damage runs deep-- beyond the death toll, beyond the structures--into the psyche of those affected by the devastation; a depth I cannot fathom. As a poet, I could not help but be fascinated by such an event; the poetic mind is, I think, less creative than it is empathetic and less that than morbidly curious--if not as a whole, than at least for me. So in the aftermath of the storm--the news coverage, the horrifying images--of course I was compelled by my blinking cursor to say something. To make note of the event if not sense of it. But I knew I was no match for the cataclysm. Nature, as she often does, had left me nonplussed.

A couple of days passed. I took stock of the storm's disarray, hoping to find my way into some aspect of its horror (empathy) or beauty (curiosity). Then I remembered something I heard on the radio when the tornado was bushwhacking Tuscaloosa. The meteorologist had said something about the debris--how it was turning up in Birmingham, falling from the sky.

Then I wrote the following poem. It does not do justice to the storm. Because it can not. In fact, the storm is intentionally distant, ravaging elsewhere, juxtaposed with the relative calm of a flower garden. Because flower gardens, I can do. EF-4 tornadoes--not so much. This is still a work in progress (and please do chime in, if so inclined) but I thought I'd share it while it's fresh.

Debris

“ . . .soon in glory bright unclouded . . .”

Tornadoes came to Alabama—commemorative

Stamp of blasted timber, shattered homes.

Miles away, Eugenia transplanted bulbs

Of tulip. Each time she stood, her spine radiated

Tendrils of flame. Wincing, she spaded

The soil. Winds flexed and muscled trees.

Eugenia sang her favorite hymn.

“ . . . all my sins and grief to bear . . .”

Tornadoes ambushed Tuscaloosa, spun

Cars and children and motel receipts

From clandestine loves. Hailstones the size

Of tulip bulbs. “ . . . what a privilege to carry . . .”

A photo fell in Eugenia’s garden, worse

For the weather—torn and grimed, missing

The head of the man beside the woman

Who smiled a smile for the ages, eyes cinched

Against a flash in the offing.

Eugenia hummed an interlude, surveyed

The sky—white clouds and blue on blue.

“ . . . o, what peace we often forfeit . . .”

Eugenia resumed. The photo flew

On a gust. She reached but her back caught fire.

She passed an hour supine, watching mementos

Fall, blinking off incidental splats of rain.

Litter like ashes like weeds in her garden—

To be plucked and shoe-boxed just in case.

“ . . . blessed Savior thou hast promised . . . "

Tornadoes plowed, Eugenia sang. A smile for the ages

Flew—mile after mile on weakening gales.

smell of absence

Here's one I wrote a couple of years ago. I'm in the mood of it right now and it's coincidentally seasonal. It occurs to me that I may have posted this one before which causes it to occur to me that I should create an archive list for the poems I have included in this blog. Look for said list in an upcoming page with links to the original posts. (Because I just know some of you have favorites that you would like to read again and again and again and again.) So, whether for the second time or the first, here is . . .

Grandfather After Nineteen Years

I knew you in the grocery aisles,

In the butchery bloody with steak.

I found you in the back counting boxes

Of cereal, at the register frowning.

I remember your store for its smell

Of absence when the fluorescents

Fizzed out like soda and the placard

On the door was flipped to Closed.

In the house underneath, when the den

Was dark with Christmas lights,

You called for your rifle and fired

Into the Blue Ridge foothills.

Deaf, I waited for the moment

To make sense. Needing the toilet,

Not daring to budge. Your scope

Brought me close to the beast—

The struggle up, the final buckle,

And also, now I know, the fragmented

Whole of our meantime lives:

Each malaise and renaissance,

Each –ectomy, suture, and December

Ever since. And always—ears pricked,

listening—the preserved and looming

Bust of the eight-point buck,

Its dead eyes following me.

going home

I was born in Lynchburg, Virginia. Small town then. Smallish now. Besides being my birthplace and its atrocious name, it is probably best known for its intrepid cleric--one Jerry Falwell and his more reasonable extension, Liberty University.

The year was 1975. The month was December. The day was the fourteenth of thirty-one--not quite middling.

Within a couple of years, I left Lynchburg behind for the larger town of Richmond where I spent ten years bicycling, shoplifting, collecting baseball cards, playing a variety of tags, whining, and being average at sports, above average at school, and below average at having friends--which was fine because I had a big brother and, before long, three little ones. Life, on average, was good. And, as it turns out (having witnessed and heard-tell of other lives) far, far too good for complaints.

Today, I am leaving for Lynchburg. My birthplace. For a funeral. Too easily ironic to elaborate the irony. In fact, I am troubled to find that my feelings about the trip are ones of alternating hesitation and resignation.

But why? Well . . . I suppose there's my natural aversion to dolor and its wont of sucking one into its melancholic juices, there to marinate until dour, until sour with thoughts of one's own mortality. Thoughts I've overthought already. Already having brushes near enough to taste. (In my experience, that particular taste is sweet, the moment calm, the resignation so pure as to obviate all hesitation. But this irony too is almost too blah to mention.)

What else? Well . . . there's the fact that the uncle for whom the bell tolled is the one I've interacted with the least over the years. (35 since 1975 [he calculated unnecessarily]). So there's a sense that among the nearer family members I will feel somehow unworthy of bereavement. That somehow, when I go to hug a cousin or an aunt, there will be a coolness in my touch that bespeaks my absence from their lives. On one hand, this is a bogus thought. An imaginary exclusion. But on the other hand, I believe there is something to it. Not a bad thing and certainly not a good thing but just a thing. A thing that makes you feel that way without offering excuse or implicating its agency. Just an icky, unavoidable thing.

Anything more? Not much. I'm not a fan of the shrinkray of adulthood. The redoubtable influence of time over matter. The squish of youth beneath the heels of experience. The verdant football yard now barely a swatch of brown grass.

Oh, and I hate, with a capital HATE, car trips. Anything over thirty minutes really sticks in my craw--which is saying a lot because otherwise I have no craw to speak of for all that I know. Craws are like the appendices that way. Unnoticeable until molested. In that case, craws are also like one's feeling upon going home. Not just for a funeral but for an encounter with the living. The rest of us. The flesh-wrapped skeletons, still warm from birth.