WORLDVIEW

My eyes are tired of seeking.
They weep but cannot bring the world to focus.
I want to lose my squint,
let the tiny muscles that wrinkle my lower lids relax.
I don’t want to look at, I just want to look,
to let the lines of black letters
creep into a corner and die in a jumble
like the crimped legs of a dessicated spider.
Formation, not information.
Shadow and light, not black and white.
I want to gaze at the splotches of dandelions and buttercups
among the shining singular blades of grass.
Soon, the surgeon will make his cuts, insert his plastic,
and what will I see then? A world fixed.
A thirty-year mortgage rate. Term life.

KITTY SPEAKS ON HER 83rd BIRTHDAY

My friends have all gone off and left me.
They didn’t mean to. They’d have stayed if they could.
Some of them aren’t even dead. The nurses turn them
every day to keep off bedsores.
I see the future in their blank stares.

Roy left me long ago. He took lead soldiers with him,
Cracker Jack prizes we played with one whole summer,
making battlefields on the yellow clay pond bank.
He took the wagon wheel merry-go-round Daddy made us,
and swinging across the creek on wild grapevines.

Betty took the playhouse we made out of limestone cleared
from plowed fields. We built walls with flat rocks, used
a big sandstone for a table, a rock with a hollow for a crib.
Our dolls were made of rag and yarn. I had one with a china head
and shiny ringlets, but it was not for outdoor play.

Rose took crisp fall nights cooking sorghum in a copper pot,
the sweet smell of cane mixed with hickory smoke.
While Wheatley passed around his home brew, Daddy played
jigs on his old mouth harp, and the boys jumped dying coals.
Baby Roy got blistered feet that night.

Howard was the last. He took away my dancing.
Oh we danced, we danced the Black-Eyed Girl
to squeaky fiddles on linoleum floors, the two-step
to jukebox guitars in roadhouses over on the highway.
One June night, under the headlights of our Ford Roadster and
Pim Toole’s 1937 Chevrolet, we danced
on the Gratz bridge to Guy Lombardo on the radio.

One way or another, now, they’ve all left me here
where grandchildren treat me like my old china doll.
I am trapped, a creature of rouge and talcum.
They kiss my leather cheeks and laugh
as though I were a wrinkled baby. I want my friends.

[Note: This poem was published in a slightly different version in my chapbook: Dance the Black-Eyed Girl.]

NAMESAKE

Named for my mother’s mother Reenie Florence,
though I’d have said less flowery, more prim,
her cabbage rose linoleum belied
by her lace curtain shams, the flags that graced
her hillside yard confined in well-made beds,
grass thick but trimmed, the only perfect place
for rolling girls. She never let me see
her seated at her triple-mirrored vanity
with deep sweet-smelling drawers, though I would preen
and read the labels like an invocation:
Elizabeth Arden, Maybelline, and Ponds.

One day I found her Woolworth-frame Roy Rogers
in my mother’s box of family snaps.
Could this have been her black-haired fantasy:
saved by his big blonde horse, his bullet-hole eyes.
When Pawpaw’s coronary forced a sale,
a move to town, did she sometimes smile?
As slopjar splattered into privy, did
she dream porcelain and her own paycheck?
She was in her fifties when he died.
She wouldn’t come back even for a day.
Maybe she was fresh out of nostalgia,
and Smith House cook was easy, lively work
for one who used to shine that poplar log
homestead, rats and black snakes in the attic.

I BRING FIRE
November turns gold to gray, and I fire up
heaters, the Kerosun in the back bedroom,
the Corona in the kitchen. They become
the white-hot centers we revolve around.
The furnace pushes heat through unseen ducts,
central heat decentralized. My wife disdains
my kerosene, the factory smell of poverty.
But I can’t feel warm unless I see a flame.

I smelled coal oil in this house winters
after school, when I held my hands
to a brown stove hitched to the flue
by black pipe. I watched the red flame
through the isinglass. I smelled coal oil –
and soup in the black iron pot.

SONG FOR MY UNCLE

Beekeeper, renowned
for his locust honey, he
could find the queen, settle
the swarm, He lost his taste
for it after the war.

Double-Dutch jumper,
the champ at Harris School,
two-step dancer to “My Blue
Ridge Mountain Home.” He kept
his feet on the ground after the war.

The guns at his burial spoke
three loud times in the sun
of a New Year’s afternoon:
a three-cornered flag, shell
casings in a red velvet bag.

All the preacher said,
he was: baptized at fourteen,
deacon at thirty-two.
He married but could not leave
his mother’s house after the war.

GENERATIONS
(Kitty, At 86, Speaks of her Mother and her Grandmother)

1. Mom

I’ll bury Tim under that old shithouse,
he loves it so much.

Mom said mean things like that sometimes.
She dreamed flush toilets and a city life.
She thought Dad held her on the farm, had failed
the promise of the red-wheeled buggy he
came courting in, she sixteen and he
a man full-grown, with cash and Sally,
stepping stylish in the harnass,
leaving all the boys in her dust.

It was Sally pulled the sled the day
we moved to Granmaw’s place, the year
I finished second grade. We had to leave
the house on Elk Ridge Pike with all our goods
piled on and tied. Dad walked in front. We dragged
along behind, Mom and Roy and me.
The sled skid easy down the steep North Hill,
across the Buck Elk ford. A harder pull
for Sally up the grade to Granmaw’s place,
no sound but runners screeching, Mom crying.

2. Granmaw Keith

Granmaw didn’t wear no step-ins, just
those long things they called shimmies. She left
a trail when she walked across the floor.
Mom lugged water from the well. She mopped
and washed and cooked and carried slop.

Granmaw died when Mom was twenty-nine.
She left the farm to Dad, her middle son.
She left trouble too, Uncle John,
Uncle Porter, suddenly sentimental
for the homeplace, sixty acres of hill,
a washed-out ridge, and one little bottom for tobacco,
a barn and a two-storey poplar-log house.

Granmaw had heart dropsy. She smoked
a corncob pipe. She’d let me sit her lap,
tamp tobacco in, show me the haint
under the big old cedar. Sometimes I’d see.

3. Kitty

All my life on three hills and all
in sight. Granmaw’s was the second hill.

Nobody left now remembers the other house,
the little one on Elk Ridge Pike, or how
Mom liked to swing through the dance.
Dad made good money on the road crew.
Aunt Mae’d come visit two, three weeks
at a time. Sisters twenty, twenty-one,
they liked to hitch Sally to the buggy,
drive to town on Dad’s new road, challenge
any cruising boys to race, with me
and Roy clinging on behind the seat.

I’m like my Granmaw now. I leak
a little, sometimes, when I cough.
Old wornout women get that way.

Mom buried Dad up town, of course,
under a double tombstone with an urn
for Decoration. The homeplace brought enough
for that and a four-room house on Perry Street.
Some days she used to say she missed the farm.

PHLEBOTOMIST

“Eighty-seven,” she said, “now there’s something you can be proud of.” Tanned, waxed, streaked, she placed her blue plastic carrier on the bed, bent at her supple waist, grasped a bony arm and stretched back the skin with her left hand. She tapped the inside of the elbow joint with a manicured right index finger. “Though I don’t know, as mean as the world is today, if I’d want to live as long as you.” She snapped the rubber tourniquet out and tied it tight around a bicep, gathering in the withered skin like a waistband. “I’ll tell you what, I’m from a small town and I’m heading back there as soon as this semester is over. I don’t need to be a nurse that bad.” She stretched the inner elbow skin, spanked it again, sank the needle. “There’s too much drama here for me. I’ve got a stalker. Works for the construction crew down the block. Obviously just zonked out on drugs.” She plucked the vacuum tubes from her carrier, red top, blue top, yellow, pink, purple, and tossed them on the bed. “It’s spooky. He knows everything, what time I come in, when I’m alone.” One by one she filled the tubes from the catheter, maroon blood flowing in at 45 degrees. “The other students said I should call the cops, but what are they going to do? Set somebody to watch my house around the clock? Yeah, right.” She pulled the needle, tossed it in the sharps box, unleashed the tourniquet, gathered the tubes in her right hand like a child plucking dandelions and violets. “I told my Daddy I want to borrow his pistol.” She labeled the tubes, fed them into their proper slots, one, two, three, four, five. “He said, honey, you’ll get in trouble with that thing. You have to have a license.” She picked up her carrier and walked toward the door. “I told him, Daddy, you gave me a license for that pistol when you taught me how to use it.” She was gone in a whiff of Warm Vanilla Sugar.

ARS POETICA

The line pulls back on the sentence
the way I pulled on the reins
of my Pawpaw Tim’s Spotted Mare

(she was huge
and had no other name—in one
box Brownie frame she seems
to top the old homestead’s front porch,
my freckled cousin in her pleated jumper
ready to step off onto roofing tin
and through the window into
the attic where Old Bloody Bones
creaked in the night,
hungry, my Pawpaw said, for big-eyed girls)

the way I sawed with the reins
on her tough mouth
the day she bolted in the hay field
because Billy Gene Richardson
forgot to unhook the singletree,

a 30-inch length of seasoned hedge
left to bump fetlocks at every step,
unseen, unseeable,
predatory, stronger
than a half-inch leather line
and a ring snaffle bit

and besides her neck was thick
as my ten-year-old torso
so I would have done better
just to hang on
to the hames or her black mane
until she came heaving to a stand
under the sycamores
that lined the fence row but

my scrawny legs had long since lost
their purchase on her barrel chest
and I hit the one dust puddle
in a world of stubble.

THREE MANUFACTURED THINGS

1. The cup
It might be tin, a cheap thing meant to hold
campfire coffee. But the swan-neck arc
and filigree of the handle speak
baptismal silver, and a frugal aunt’s
choice of plate explains the rust.
Taken from the sideboard, lost in the playhouse,
nothing more sinister needed to explain
the tarnish, dents, the crack along the rim.

2. The ball
The ball gets on my nerves, its neon green,
its fuzzy surface prickly as fiberglass.
It’s too competitive, too loud, all bounce,
no mystery, a hell-fire and damnation
Baptist in the company of Trappists.
This featureless bright ball leaves no place
to rest the eye, it’s dull if not in play.
It wants a bat, the slobbering mouths of dogs.

3. The charm
This teardrop Buddha, embossed on coral clay,
fits the cup of my palm, invokes repose,
invites the restless spirit to be still,
and yet the upward play of lines — crossed legs,
a forearm resting on a thigh — moves
the eye toward the point of Buddha’s coiled
hair. Worry it, turn it over, see
on the otherwise blank back, fingerprints.

THREE REASONS WHY I’M NOT A GAMBLER: A ROMANCE

One. Age 10. Daddy. Roof-beam walker. Trotting draft horse a broadway for his feet, two jars of homebrew for a balance pole. Not one drop spilt. Not a rambler, not a gambler. Entrepreneur. Bets his skill against the bank loan. Restless at the saddle-bred show, five dollar bill in hand, I set out for the midway. Ride the Merry-Go-Round, said Daddy. Eat cotton candy, popcorn, red-glazed apples on a stick. Try the funhouse mirrors. Get your fortune told, but shun the carnie shills. Forget about the giant kewpie doll. I haunt the duck pond. Two for a quarter, everybody wins a prize.

Two. Age 13. Jimmy. Tall dark stranger. Still waters. I’d slant-eyed this boy countless summers. Vacation Bible School. Sunday morning church. He wore a tie. Bertram’s boy, said Mama, here to spend the summer with his granny. Would our brown eyes, over the heads of those shuffling worshippers, spark, burn down the church? A fair date, chauffeured by his uncle in a Dodge coupe. New peach sundress, strapless bra, spaghetti straps. Gregory Peck. Audrey Hepburn. Roman Holiday. Unforeseen, his fear of the midway – rickety Tilt-a-Whirl, whiplashing Crack the Whip. Enticed finally onto the Ferris wheel, he grips the bar white-knuckled. I tear my sundress getting off.

Three. Age 16. Bobby. All American boy. Shortstop. Rifleman. 1963 Impala convertible, V-8, black with red interior. I spilled drive-in-movie orangeade on the upholstry but our love was strong. Pat Boone. Ann Margret. My state fair is a great state fair. Rides to dazzle the eyes – Wildcat, Scrambler – but still the same old carnie shills. The delicious articulation of shoulder, elbow, wrist will not knock down the pyramid of bottles, no matter how flushed the face, how sweaty the brow. I gaze down the midway where the calliope plays and the bumper cars spark.

LINES WRITTEN AFTER HEARING W. S. MERWIN READ A POEM ABOUT HIS LAST CONVERSATION WITH HIS FATHER

I can’t remember seeing Dad alive
a final time, no fraught silences, no
significant filial neglect, although I’ve

memories enough of failure in those slow
years of his dying. I had been the bold
daughter, Daddy’s jolie blonde, but froze

when in those struggling months I saw that old
and breathless men are not thereby made mild.
Those wasted stringy muscles hold

the imprint of a power, a will both wild
and ordinary, strength enough to punch
a nurse. Daddy had to rage, would yield

only to death, that bushwhacked him at lunch
one August Wednesday, smoulder of Camel in the tray,
swollen left foot tucked under his scrawny haunch.

No chance for deathbed drama, no chance to say
what we would not have said, our softer fealty
sealed in a steel-gray suit, a church-yard grave.

No chance to overwrite the day I failed
a father stripped and strapped to a plastic chair
without a sheet or curtain to hide his frailty,

the day I learned love can be trumped by fear,
that I had no resources that could tame
the alien eloquence of his hate-filled stare,

and since I could not speak to him of shame,
I don’t remember that we spoke again.

ELEGY

Anna Katherine Toole is dead,
Lillian Glass too.
Each week a few
more elders die

who lived the life my mother lived.
The dogwood blooms
again. Mother takes
the sun and laughs.

I lie making spoons with you, feel
your breath against
my neck. The blood
runs hot. Hold me.