Days
There are days when grass
grows faster than the mower runs
and days lives break apart
more readily than hard clay ground
against the sharp edge of a shovel.
The Pope and Robert Creeley are dead,
and the things I love today resemble
you and I as I remember
no more than the fresh pruned bushes
are reminiscent of their natural selves.
There are days when hope gets
back on its feet faster than
balloons escape the grasps of toddlers
and days longing is no more than
a soap bubble popping
in the face of a stranger.
Black Mountain Pope, the pine pollen
has turned my gray car green today
and left the cat sneezing
into our scrambled eggs.
There are days when even the berry vines
are disapproving and days the mint
grows too fast to drink without friends.
They are flocking to Rome today,
and the memory of my faith in you
remains unreliable at best.
The one-eyed poetry is dead.
The Beachside Waffle House—Gulfport, Mississippi
This place is not from around here,
which is exactly why I have come.
At the furthest point south
in my state, I will give up the South.
That is the act of love I do.
I have been other places—
prairies so full of sky the red,
endless soil of Lincoln County
becomes as nothing, infinitesimal.
Deserts, with their sudden drop-offs,
three thousand feet or more
into the layering shock of Utah’s
one hundred and fifty million years—
just there for the claiming
of anyone’s Polaroid.
In Manhattan, the five or six people
who sat near me at a party
resembled the five or six people
who’ve sat near me in numerous
small towns, but I was thinking
they were different somehow
if only for the fact that there were
millions more nearby, and I imagined
these people may have been to a ballet
outside of the one long school bus ride
into Jackson, sixth grade.
At the Waffle House, the coffee is cold,
my pancakes are brought out with sausage
though I’ve explained my vegetarianism,
the men in the next booth, reading the paper,
are incensed over the mayor’s threatened indictment.
This could be happening anywhere.
This is the stuff no one has to worry about.
It is the leaving, then returning in life
that teaches us who we are,
that teaches us why we love.
In Mississippi, I am no Mississippian.
I have become about the ways
I’ve gone away, and once, walking
with a man who’d never been here before
down the creek bank where my grandfather
had trapped beaver and baptized me
as an infant, I thought it was looking
more familiar to him, like something
he’d known well from the north.
I come back to pick up what will
be useful to me when I leave again.
The man, my friend, comes back
to me sometimes to do the same.
The Waffle House, with views
of the Gulf to the south
antebellum mansions to the north,
casinos east and west
offers something concrete,
something impossible to explain.
In Manhattan, someone will ask me
a question. In Utah, someone will
ask me a question. In Oklahoma,
many people have asked me an
important, unanswerable question.
What is it like down there?
What is it like to be
from a place like that?
What is it like to be from a place?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The Siege
His summer job is to become a monument,
remind people from Ohio and Kansas
that Vicksburg will never overcome war,
but usually, as they watch him
kneel behind a cannon, on the lookout
for Yankees who come
from the other end of the park,
the Kudzu-covered past,
he isn't thinking at all about the South,
just fondling the name "Jennie"
where it's scratched into
the black rust-proof paint
of the cross-section.
He heard a story once
about an angel with six toes,
a picture of it hanging in a fort in Texas.
And when he is here,
acting out his part as the statue of a soldier,
he wonders at it, at Jennie,
at the idea of angels
piecing her body back together
and adding an extra toe.
He imagines her, with new white tennis shoes,
slipping her foot in so that this toe
smooths down, disappearing
into her body like the belly
he'd watched her zip
over and over into tight jeans.
She'd like the feel of it,
of an oddity the angels would
tease her for, then ignore
as if there were nothing much to it,
nothing much to being different,
to sliding off a motorcycle
into a new existence.
The impact, the jolt of cannons
that are never fired,
strangers who can't see his fingers
tracing the letters that make up "Jennie"
and don't care how his feet
shape into his boots,
would be nothing more to her
than a vague sense of something missing,
something like the fear of a soldier
who can't believe the enemy was ever there.