Gravity

1

tonight he prays for the poles that hold the barn
for ripped tin and raised nails for the ivy-covered
fence line for rain rushing into the green gorge
for rusty cars pushed under a row of brittle pines
for the old limping dog blind in his left eye
for the crazy neighbor who lost his wife last year
for the preacher with the Moses tattoo on his back
for his son who always wanted to be a wrestler
tonight he prays for the poles that hold the barn

**

2

his body hung through most of April
from a limb that reached up like an umpire’s arm
his work jacket and flannel shirt tattered
some drunks riding horseback on the mountain
trespassing on the trail that ran the width
of a Florida timber company’s land found him
stopping long enough to watch his boots dangle
against the backdrop of blue sky
it was a pretty day they told the sheriff
that they’d never forget the smell
or what the birds had done

**

3

Night outside the lobby breathed death;
black cars, headlights snuffed,
inching clock hands
in the absence of moonlight.
Night, hurtling down Highway 70,
nothing good could come from
the Beamer with tinted windows, the
blinking convenience store sign.
Sound of a truck horn, the Indian
working late in the Gulf garage,
squinting, running a greasy hand
through his Elvis hair, flicking a smoke.
Night, heinous and terrible, moving
out this way like the city while we dreamed
in deadbolt safety, and the bald headed
auditor calculated the distance to his pistol.

**

4

So he puts X=6 on the board,
says I’m gonna show you
how to figure out this problem
and then starts drawing
all this other number stuff;
then pretty soon he’s back
to X=6 at the bottom.
So math is like this I think;
you remember when the kids
all went cruising,
into the downtown,
around the courthouse,
you know, back before the mall.
Now when they stopped at a light,
they would all get out,
run around the car
screaming and laughing,
get back in
when the light turned green.
They would of course be
in different seats,
but it would be
the same damn kids in the car;
that’s how math works.

**

5

Unloading the machines
in a false dawn,
he pauses to rest
but can’t let
the Mexicans think
there’s a moment
to pause, not for a laugh
or a joint smoked
out by the pine bluff.
He counts the contracts
in his head again
as they mount
the Wright standers;
the gray sky finally
beginning to yellow
beyond the mountaintops,
he chokes the weeder,
pulls it down to a whine.
They’ll do ten today,
by God, he thinks,
skimming along the
wrought iron fence as
he watches the Mexicans,
black-haired in red caps
charging into the mist.

**

6

The banjo player was a little guy,
dressed oddly for a pig pickin
in a suit and tie. He was weak-chinned
and baby faced. He looked like
a jack-leg preacher and the perspiration
darkened the armpits of his jacket
as the band struck an edgy path through
a series of bluegrass standards
and the neighborhood folks
lounged in a hundred varieties
of lawn chairs, tapping their feet,
mothers with babies in their laps,
kids leaning over the rails of the
pasture gate, mooing at the cows.
When Shotgun and the Monkey Man
drove their red 250 across the orchard
and into the side yard, the banjo player
stopped on a nervous lick,
smiled a quick smile and leaped
from the far end of the hay wagon,
but they were already coming for him.

**

7

He wavered and ached,
wandered who were the savages,
weeds climbing tomato vines,
light probing the tear in the tin roof,
storm that hides behind the mountain,
wolves that slip along the river.
He thought about fence line diplomacy,
rusty drops of rain, moss and rocks;
he thought of her lovely neck arching,
humming as she hung the wash;
he thought of a way to win her back,
and then he thought
of a way to kill her.

**

8

I’m gonna end this thing with a bullet,
he said, and the child shuddered because
he had never heard such desperation
in his father’s voice, and the boy’s mind
did not know the words for this feeling
that swam up through his legs and sagged
in the trench of his stomach. He sat deeper
in his little rocking chair; the black and
white TV rolled and stopped, rolled
and stopped, rolled and stopped.
bourbon, then ice, then glass
struck the screen, and the wood floor
shivered as the man stomped past,
slamming the screen porch door.
The boy slumped deeper as
the picture flickered and dissolved
to one white dot of light,
then disappeared.

**

9

He’s back at the old home place
walking the gray uneven front porch planks,
waiting for the afternoon sun to cross
through the grandfather oak branches.
And he hears his father’s ghost voice
calling him to come get the mule;
the familiar ring of metal against metal
peals from the workshop,
and he somehow knows
that his older brother is smoking silently
out behind the feed lot.
It is a beautiful September Wednesday,
and in the back bedroom where the
waxy brown tile that she loved
has already curled in the corners,
his mother is dying.

**

10

A brother stops by on his bike,
tall, lanky, fit at seventy-two,
he stands by his deceased brother’s
grape vines, eating scuppernongs,
sucking the sweet tangy juice,
flipping the hulls into the barley field.
He watches afternoon clouds separate
lazily over Baker’s Mountain, listens
to the tin flap on the equipment shed.
When he is through, he wipes his
glasses, his hands, and fits a black
and gold helmet back on his head,
clipping his cleats into pedals
and he is out of the orchard and back
on Henry River Road. Tom can’t
recall exactly where Enoch’s buried
in the county cemetery out by the
racetrack, but he knows where
to go to pay his respects.

**

11

He ran like the thing itself
across the lazy hills where
the cows once lay just before
sunset licked the pines above
Lindsay’s field.
He ran slow as a wheeze
in October’s deep chest,
pumping his spindly arms,
through wild moustache grass
un-mown since late June.
He ran like the gentle hush
that falls over the field after
midnight, and his feet were
like the hands of an old clock
finding their way.

**

12

The afternoon tastes like a horse,
wind swishing through the dry field.
This land grown over and cleared
seven times, hills goateed with
brown tufts of joint grass, a double
track trail seeded with quartz fists.
The afternoon is uncomfortable
as burlap; a man in a black hunting coat
rises, hat, shoulders, torso
from the lower meadow
where there is no time.

**

13

When he caught up to Hatley
halfway through the whiplash
turns on Highway 1002,
the world pulled its gravity tight,
and he would have passed
the robin egg blue Torino
with his slipping transmission
shit bag yellow Falcoln,
but he saw Hatley crouched
sidewise in the driver’s window,
steering with his stinking bare feet,
grinning and heralding him
with a double-barreled gig,
and he knew before the car
skipped the bank and skidded
into Rath Burton’s corn field
that he’d not really seen it,
that nobody, not even Daddy
was coming back for him.

**

14

she said act like you got some sense
but I didn’t know what she meant
so I asked the boys if they’d like
to shoot the rifles across the field
hell the cows were up and most
of the folks had finished their pig
and were just sitting around
commenting on the heat
or swatting at the flies
she came running out of the kitchen
her hair sweaty and frazzled
hanging down in her face and
that big red cooking apron flapping
the guns is a crazy idea she said
as we both watched the youngest
one shouldering papaw’s old 22
it was the boys’ idea I said and
she winced at the report as
the bullet snipped a pine limb
two hundred yards away.

**

15

He’s thinking about
the throwing stars of heaven,
how little more we are
than the beasts
that in the morning
come to their trough,
and he is thinking of how
in the afternoon light
he backed his truck
out of his parking space,
and there was another man
there waiting patiently
for him to leave,
and he is thinking of the river
way down below
the bottom meadow,
always coming fresh
down out of the mountains,
then riding the sun south
as it pools
toward the sea.