Playing Dead Ponders His Epic

1.

Who am I, inching down this bark of lichens,
A rattle to the creek’s edge,
Washing my feet to creep more,
Unearth something my tongue might savor.
More cruel than bug or beetle I lose conscientiousness,
Today, loitering, tomorrow, immovable anchor at the womb-door,
My warped mouth down on the earth’s crags,
Under my thumb, what hard rejoicing.

The morning blue casts charity in my heart and flaps November leaves.
All I keep on my mind is this: From now on all my friends are going to play dead.
I’ll form a hillbilly band and arch my back the way an ache disappears with affection—
Steel, fiddle, bass, mandolin.

I’ll crouch and pat my foot, pooch my lips
Right into a sweetgumball I’ll pretend’s a microphone.
Possums will come running.
My mother will be proud.
And the blackbird will sleek and preen for me in worm-dirt.
The rhythms will just be awesome.

2.

I pray that I may hold the altar where words come from,
Leading me onward out of this clayroot my forebears knew.
My human friends—Shelby Stephenson, Tex Ritter, Dale and Roy—
Many in Hillbilly Heaven—waiting for my baritone.
Pray, Muse, that my lines may lead us beside the upper air,
Leveling out the lower for the sons and daughters the Gods of Possum—embody—

3.

I yawn to see my destiny—
Suggestions of quintuplets galore, sons maybe as many as fifty
Pursuing wives slain on their wedding nights, during rutting season.
The epics all written, the heroes dead or killed in imitation of perils
Carvings cannot depict, since my first father, O Cliff-face,
Still crawls through love’s knot, leaving a surfeit of his future everywhere.

**

PD Contemplates Religion

1.

“Ah,” said Playing Dead. “Could I be chosen?”
Big Hunter, burnt out with creating a game-plan, nodded.
“Is this a sign?” Asked Playing Dead, “How will I know?”
Big Hunter’s arm was the tree in which Playing Dead made his den.
“Wake up,” said Playing Dead, “Let’s talk turkey.”
Big Hunter turned on his side, like Orion with no ears.

Playing Dead plucked a twig and chewed.

With this brush I thee chew

Talking to himself made him feel stronger.

He bared his teeth.

Half-grinning, sullen. Silent.
(Flabbergasted.)

2.

Playing Dead realized Big Hunter loved him─
The instinct to hunt was just that.
A fact.
Heartened by his knowledge, PD lounged in a mimosa.

He was glad Big Hunter spoke Possum─
And was bi-lingual to boot.

But how could BH love loading
Bullets in .22 rifles
And going out with sons and daughters on hunts cool November nights
While Playing Dead’s children rutted?

PD realized there were many Gods
And those Gods and Big Hunter’s God allowed the animals to be slaughtered
And there was the God-man─Mary’s Son

And His soul lived in Playing Dead, too,
On the run as he had to survive—

Branded wherever I go.

**

PD’S Recipes

Hunters & Taters

White was the thirteenth tit
Black the end of the bristles
White was the tail
Red the liver and the lungs
Unable to breathe in and out
(There was so much traffic)
Black the crawl into light
White her swelling dream
The rude world waited for
And the huge throng
When she dashed up a persimmon

**

Playing Dead Deader

1.

Playing Dead, fed up with Big Hunter and his descendants,
looked toward crystal seas
and the inheritors of Weedy Places—and more fed up with BH,
looked at Lilith—and the center went sigodlin, catybiarson.
BH’s followers broke down and cried.

Then the vision and grit, ground to a halt,
spawned risings and sores aplenty.
Things got worse: BH & Company farmed a colony of cul-de-sacs.
Doom, despair, and agony on me—Playing Dead.
He stuck out his tongue, slobbering: “My word,”
slinking into the hairless trail of himself.

2.

He could see BH in his mansion paring his nails.
Possum hides hung rotten on boards in cracks
(BH neglected to send them to F. C. Fur Company, Chicago).
PD longed for some old order where farms settled in groves.

He wondered if he would run out of trees to climb.
And it happened that development
got caught up in his story
as big yellow dozers woke up the earth
leaving scoops shaped like mouths

where once oxen and mules and tractors
furrowed straight and the farmer and his family
worked the fields, the corn to fodder,
peas to pods

and houses went up on the farms—
They are farming houses Mrs. PD cried—
and the moving dirt yawned
O farmlife—What is passing—
and Desert Wind came back—
Tara, Landsing, Sunnybrook, Creek Stone.

**

The Eye of Playing Dead

1.

He moves through the underworld, soundless,
Whirls around a morsel like a windup top, stops,
Bares his fifty like an array of bullets, gangster-like,
His patrol low to the ground, belly dragging gravel
Shoulder-long and hard-by, lifting his neck to show a chest
All grizzly with age and yearning, avoiding the cage, ever,

Though he remembers hearing stories how the Stephensons
Would fatten one out to please the dogs.
Mr. Paul bragged on old Butler—“Best possum dog around”—and how Butler
Kept running when he and Playing Dead were let alone to run—
“Ain’t seed nary one of em yit”—chimed the future voices for the younger
Ones wanting to tell how it was to grow up
On opossum and raccoon, squirrels and rabbits and other small game—
Makes him bear his teeth more for grin and perked ears
Than leaving tracks in roadditches on the way to the mailbox for Big Hunter to say—
“Last night—fresh tracks!”

2.

The sun’s resurrection strengthens PD’s wonderment.
He knows forever he’s gar-nosed.
Like a cinder in a jug-maker’s fire
His reverie collapses.
He drags himself from the scene and heads toward a hole.
Maple leaves twirl backwards in the wind
Vibes The Creek Bridge chords as cars rumble wood.

Wondering if this story’s enough, he spies a yellow warbler.
A cypress snags his mouth, his fuzz white as snow and black as tar.
There will be time to sun in the shade of things—
Images—Mrs. PD lounging for their story,
Folding her lingerie for the moment they might rest in one another’s arms.