Three Poems

TO THE LOGGERHEAD, JULY 17, 2005

The bay’s skin ripples like time itself and if one could follow
Its motions back towards the muddy beginning
One might discover the wiggling of a sea turtle, old enough
To escape a slave’s soup, and young enough to avoid
Sand sharks which comb the shallow perches of the back creek
Crotches and sandbars.
The shallow perches and sand bars
Which themselves wiggle and shift as the bay shakes her hips,
What was high and long and perfect for a beach at low tide
Becomes the broken archipelagos of a summer afternoon.

A summer afternoon of light beer and rockfish but no turtles,
At least live ones anyway and what had once flippered the creeks
Now only appears at the end of a fishhook, or at the corners
Of a muddy groom. It is only one sign that the watershed
Belongs to everyone and no one, crab-pot markers, thinning pines
Before new homes settled like white moss against
What had always been green going back to a time when
There were only turtles and sand sharks, before even Slave
Soup, which is farther than anyone cares to remember,
Except for the loggerheads which hatch on the fewer shores
Each season.
It is at this point the old turtle emerges
For the last time, exhales once and dies. He’s as wide as the boat
And half as long and its carapace tells a story that is our story, and not
Our story, and nothing but a shell.
Examine the lower quadrant
And discover the chip where a round-ball cracked it when a drunken
Confederate wasted a round a full week before the ironclads
Plodded into Hampton Roads. A week later the loggerhead
Avoided a fisher’s gaff near a batch of horseshoe crabs
And suffered a scrape by an exploding cannonball
Off the Canary Islands as a Dutch trader fended off a raggle of pirates.
Near its head a compass of hooks where fishermen fouled
The beast as it rode currents back towards its hatching.
It lives in circles, and escapes circling nets, and swims
In wide ellipses until finally the crack from shrimp boat,
Which sent it back to where it was hatched to die.

And if the surface didn’t tell enough of a story,
Oil and lead takes the drama further under the skin
Of the creature which did not understand what it was that tasted bitter,
Or what irritated its dull eyes.
And of course one could follow
The ripples of the bay forward through time, past the dead turtle
Which will wash ashore and feed a clutch of crabs, and whose shell
Will sink below the sand for thirty years until the marsh is covered again
In shallow breakwater, the developer’s itch scratched away
By expanding seas, which recede again to shore, and to more
Hatchlings, and more turtles, which have for the moment
Recaptured the shores, the breakaway beaches, the eddies
And bay. Its shell, hearted and solid as any heart beating
In the chest of pioneers that saw it once, and caught it,
And for whatever reason let it go, only for it to return, if only to die.

TOBACCO TAX

Sickness rolls in her head like mercury,
Her fat tongue is dry and tart with the tang
Of medicine and bitter hard water.
Sickness rolls in her head like mercury,
And Aunt Ruth’s memories and the memories
She assumes, flicker and light her skull
And play and rewind and play again.

Aunt Ruth’s prayer beads twist around her knuckles
And leave a fine red braid when she unwinds
The black beads. Her eyes like GOING OUT OF
BUSINESS signs. The same kind Uncle Pete propped
Up in the service station window. Her nephew
Wishes she would just shut up so he can hit
The park and make the girls after he performs
His tricks.

*

Aunt Ruth remembers the exam room.
The buzz and hum of the X-ray light box.
The buzz and hum of electric heaters.

She watched her lungs open their streaked black wings.

*
Ruth met Pete in a bar parking lot. His greasy pants,
His pitched hands fumbled with a lighter.

They moved to the country. She thought the moon would bust.

He farmed a little. Built a tobacco shed
Like the one his great-great-great-great-grand-
Father had built. The dry shed only a shadow
In the wheat grass where fire touched it one
Afternoon in October.

The yellow body
In the yellow ward that is not a room
And that is a room. Aunt Ruth floats between.

*

The playgrounds got as many busted condoms
And butts as it does old tires. Nothing smells
Like youth like old rubber swings. In the back

Of the lot a skinny leg of a kid
Inhales a menthol cigarette through
His left nostril.
He hasn’t told anybody
About his aunt, or how he got hold
Of her cigarettes. They wouldn’t care, anyway.
He already knows how to inflate the very
Air about him, put on a show.

Yesterday he swallowed
A goldfish. Two days ago, ate a worm
Sandwich. He gives thanks to How to Eat Fried
Worms–and a backyard full
Of eyes crowding the sandbox to see what

He’ll do next. Stories about him
Are lying under the hedge. Stories come
Out of a hole in the ground. About how he
Can jack a leg over his skull, how he
Can jump farther on one foot than most kids
Manage on two. His furry head has eaten
A thousand worms, six hundred goldfish, stuffed
A hundred marshmallows in his rubber jowls.

He likes smoking out of one nostril, he goes
Out like a light and fills with light and understands
What it is to be light, to be nothing in the air
But hot wind, solar flare, the smile from a girl
With red hair.
She walks home with him, skips a kiss
Across his cheek and ties her hands around his neck.
He doesn’t mind. He knows more than he’s telling.

PUT TO GOOD USE

Steady under feet, she is, even after years of beatings,
Hard tides and rip winds that hurricanes bring each year.
Steady and even driving, her segments as regular as the trailers
Cutting diagonals across the creek, behind the loblollies,
Next to the bait shop, the stop that is ever made before
The boat is kicked off the beach where it is tied.
It is surprising she hasn’t buckled, nor dented,
As many do when such tempers are exacted
Along the swale where she’s parked. The tin needs new paint,
The oars a sanding, and the anchor chain crackles with rust,
Yet the flat bottom lives past the old man’s purchase,
The old man, gone in the bones, who gave it to his son,
Who bestowed it to his son, whose very chin is the same cut
And jib as the old man who bought it fifty-five years ago.
How like the ripples that spread in wide ellipses,
How like the ripples that return in the tide, the boat,
Returns to work under the hands that care for it,
That tender the fish, that mark the crab pots,
That speak the language of brightwork and chine.
In the spring when the vessel needs mending,
Sitting in the crabgrass backyard, on saw horses,
One expects to peer in and find a body, reposed and steady,
Scraping rust or ready for the last slip into the bay,
But it’s empty, except for the polished seats that glint up
Like a greasy smile and ask for nothing
But to be used as it was made, its own desire for waves
Steeled and forged in its skeletal frame.