Propagation

It’s a popular story,
the overly sensitive southern aristocrat
repelled by his distant father,
attracted to the buoyant mother
he must also escape to a northern city,
where he might discover
in a fit of astonishing circumstances,
the family’s enormous offense,
and then, of course, the complicity
that his very existence likens,
then sophisticated ladies that
are never quite imperious enough.
It draws a Rotary reading, the white
club audience in gray evening wear,
polite laughter, distracted gentlemen,
whose inadequate wives are mothers
to the next Gant, the next Conroy,
the next Percy.

Some Say

Some Say the world’s got a history,
a skinned up tragic story,
that every day is a tiny piece of it,
that time is a massive weight born over the hills,
that music makes it easier,
that love is a real special feeling,
that the smallest towns are feverish with ghosts,
that interstates run right through memories,
that life is a million act play,
that ice carved this valley,
that we are in the sun,
that cancer is the cover charge,
that the past is a full court press,
that a man can run to freedom,
that every pink dawn is a singular glory.

Hammered—1952

He said it was a sound
he’d never forget.
The team had swung north
from Winston, stopping
in Richmond and then
on to Washington where
they filled the stadium
for an afternoon double header,
were taken to a DC diner for dinner
where they ate quietly
in the wide-eyed customer glare,
wiped their tired faces and rested
while the kitchen workers cursed
and crashed dishes into metal
containers rather than reuse
what colored hands had lay on,
and he knew that if they
had fed stray dogs with those plates
they would have washed them.

Just a skinny black kid
a long way from Mobile,
he folded and refolded his napkin
as cheap china smashed the silence
and he kept his eyes down on
the checkered tablecloth.

The Word is My Shepherd; I Shall Always Want

Pain-buffered in these shuttered hours,
drunk in the throes of drink need,
I wait for the river to calm,
for the grooved heels to drag
the steer’s twisted neck down.

And if there is something to tie,
I’ll pull the whole loop through,
lie back, half-dug into heavy dirt,
Stetson raised to cheers, waiting
for the posse to make.

Pick and Roll
for David Dickson

Thirty-two years
and thirty pounds ago,
the weightless way it felt
to rise toward the rim,
to snatch the ball from air,
squeaky shoed defenders
backing around surprise screens,
drenched ammonia stench
of reversible practice jerseys,
the coach’s abrupt whistle,
silence that absorbs his tirade,
and later,
the lonely echo
of a dribble
in the empty
high school gym.

The House Painters

Soaking wet we always forget
the first summery persecution
or the swift sturdy way
that old Jack Hunger can climb
these faded stucco walls,
like an inch worm
on a marathon morning—
heart of a spider
where mercy travels
pinnacle to pedestal.
We are not men
who think to flag or flower
a father’s grave—
we remember
their ruddy orange faces,
their crazy broomstick arms
teaching us to reach under
the darkened eaves,
to strike over
weathered spots of gloom.
Days, the days glistening
in the hot glossy shuffle,
marked like parapets
by moved ladders,
salutations of intention,
buckled overalls and
overturned buckets,
the wind paints the tower;
the sky paints the lake;
the moon brushes the mountain.

One Theory

So here it is:
some horribly ill-fitted analogy,
television, the dragon that came
and stayed for supper, Jack Crack
and his intestines looped over Mexico
while the corn grew tall near Trap Hill
and the best the girls could do
was the home town’s Brando,
Kid Korea, returning from a hitch
to pitch Class D Ball, who
already knew there’s nothing
to win, nearly nothing to lose,
that tonight can’t do
a damn thing for tomorrow.
So when the game tanked,
the frontier lost its best
box of tools and the bad boys
stood up like the worst bunch
of struck out kings, waving
like the sheepishly drunken
Jack Crack out behind Mama’s
in a broken down lawn chair
and who could have known
what he saw or was
in Rocky Top as slow pitch
softball vaguely began
to weave the Internet.

Perfect Disorder

Who let’s us call the vapors?
A hot cowboy, Shakespeare
in a hurry to finish the play?

My father predicted apocalypse,
hated war movies and Republicans,
loved the Tar Heels and carpentry.

I have a brother who can’t hear.
I have a brother who can drive anything.
My parents wanted me to be a girl.

At night the dead fly through our dreams,
never bumping a window;
their existence is a perfect disorder.

The Last Thing I do is Leave
for Aaron and Thomas

I have run the craziest places:
up gravel mountain paths,
through the death head of city nights,
into gloom and joy and out past fear,
my self and my running self,
regaining unity in precise strides,
in motion the brain barely senses,
hard wires and chemistry, where
the only horror is having to stop
before the prickly crown
of heat has grown its fit,
before the act of raw effort
has a chance to produce meaning,
before I can truly accept
my inconsequence.

July

Same blue sky, same brown grass
we played through
the flash of childhood
with that forever intensity
in an enormity of time gone like
every paved over dirt road,
every house-pocked,
terraced farm field.
Same red soil, same cold,
south-running rivers
that slammed into mill dams,
sluiced through pastures
wanting a storm wall
to sheet over the forecast
as if there were a power
moving to conceal
the brooding sadness,
not just a death march,
not just a biological whirl.

Remember When

the ground was so soft
it made our tires look flat
and for a couple days
the poets stopped wondering
why we are here
when sad Lou with his weak
chin and his liquor lips lay
with his ear to the dugout floor
counting the Indians
he could remember
and there were orphans then
dying children, too, waiting
for called home runs
to come back from their graves
the countryside
was hammered with goats
and grease shitting geese
hello! the waitress said loudly
since we both had that look
that can be mistaken for deafness
not daftness or even a blunt
regular kind of confidence
though I must admit there
were days when I could not
hear my food order
and my wife was always
expecting a baseball game
like the freight train
from my father’s childhood
the shiver that a snake
gives you in the silent acre
above Flat Creek
remember when
the teacher with caked makeup
took our money
stamped our hands
with high school football
the players’ helmets glistened
under stadium lights
our band children
hushed shoes in wet grass
the quad’s cadence
aligning Orion’s bow
and I never had the insides
to shoot the horse
while the crowd’s one voice
juried its conviction
remember that climb
to the rocks by Rink Dam
where I watched
fearless stoned birds
though that memory again
is snake deaf
injured, defeated
Nosaferatu’s caped shadow
flapping like a sheet
toward the sun
spidery monkeys leaping
from the iron railings
of the bridge below
remember the cross-handed
batting mill hill kid
with black bruises and
scabs on his white legs
the size of his first
home run and the war whoop
that splintered the moon
greatness that burned
in rare furnaces
lost in the lights
that blind us
when we try.

New Morning

Passing each other, our ears
bent to scratchy schizophrenic voices,
white cats and raw luck, crawling
toward death in anabolic misery.
Now is the spell, the high spark,
the wish that this moment, our moment
might elevate itself, or call a deafening
miracle out of the big empty sky.
The heat, the heat and the dry bitter flower,
August smells the horses in the meadow;
we ride the belly of the highway, squeezing
down through the night toward the terror.
A scopolamine patch for the apocalypse,
yellow roses and a mead hall membership,
we follow the bull to the red barn,
fish the breathless Tarzan depths of the new morning.

Amiri

The only outlaw poet I’ve met,
pleasant over dinner, comfortable
talking sports, his military days,
asking questions of the young
NAACP kids, sipping the wine.
He’d lost the NJ Laureate gig
a week or two before, for writing
a poem, for being a crazy nigger,
for being paranoid, for refusing
to denounce his own words.
And it was a college gig, convo,
a public reading in a southern city,
and the little man knew where
he was in his gray suit, with
his slightly bearded professorial look.
And when he read the bone track
under the Atlantic poem, he paused,
then screamed five times “We were
slaves!!!” till the held breath of 200 people
exhaled and he paused for some water.
Before the finale, he spoke of jailings,
beatings, invited anyone to come haul
him off now before he could read what
I was waiting for; unarmed, unguarded,
he held his hands out for the cuffs.

Communique

Dad for your birthday
they are opening a
new age punk vampire movie
with young sexy heroes
in heroin addict makeup.
The news-scape is all noir
as well: bearded confessors,
long faced big toothed women,
crazed ex-lawyers in
designer reading glasses.
I am happy to report there is
nothing in the brave blue sky
to save us from except for
the face down cards and fingers
that can’t wait to turn them.
Dad for your birthday
I am going to see
your unhappy grandson—
the red headed one that got
your brain without the filter.
But I am the one
talking to the dead,
who misses the hanging curve
of childhood, the cracked up
getting by on nothing years.
And it is I who will pause
to click a glass
against the dark heavens
and drink the singular