a fair approximation of the place as it existed,
the long line of the esplanade falling off
into the distances, perhaps the fine grey of
the Pacific reaching through the uncertainty of fog,
and then at night, the book of maps now left
open on a table, I could create the bustle
of a group of stars that never were. I’d be called
lucky, or just dead wrong, and for a moment,
motionless, I’d be clearly drawn to scale upon the page
with just the clarity that I had hoped for, not knowing
the fruitlessness of having clarity among one’s hopes.
When the librarian called my name my name
was made into a kind of spell, dispersing everything
I could identify or claim as being part
of one certain, undisputed me, the long walk
down the hall as she held my hand, deferring
every question I might ask until a later time,
and I remember the bright red dust of dried-up clay
that swung in liquid-looking rivulets as I sat
in the parking lot and waited for my father’s Chevy to appear,
knowing only that someone was dying, thinking only
of the word embarcadero, any place other than the place
I was forced to occupy in time and space, any name
of any town whose weight could be abandoned
with enough repeating, and giving up at last, the last
of the other children gone, hearing in my father’s voice
his philosophy of living, always buy a Chevy, son,
those goddamn Fords are designed for obsolescence,
the plan, see, is in five years it’ll break down
and you’ll have to buy another, and I asked if it was like
the broken bicycle he’d bought for me that we’d repaired
one piece at a time until it worked, how when
we screwed the last bolt onto the new sprocket
the old bike was no longer there, everything replaced,
the broken pieces set aside and what did it mean,
and his face, which I remember over everything, lined
with a map-like certainty of shame because he had no answer,
offered none, and then the tracks of the Chevy’s tires
turned up the dust again, the pine trees bright and luminous
with their late spring blanketing of pollen underneath
the unreal quality of light in which we lived, until I climbed
into the seat beside him, that rag he had
by then begun to cough into
already resting on his knee.
The Torch and Pitchfork Blues
Whoever picks up the last of the thrown jacks
while the ball still bounces off the pavement
and hangs suspended in the kicked-up playground dust
must also retrieve the history of the ground
where it will land. There are rules. Tell us,
boy, called out on eenie, if you
have guessed them yet. Before there was
brushed nickel there was iron, before
Tommy Dunlap was pushed idly from the bus
into that busy intersection, there was
a plenitude of grief already. Measured
against all that, a single incident recedes
into no biggie, just a memory that will help
to make his fourth-grade classmates cautious,
for a time at least, until they can no longer take
the weight of that third and fourth look down the street
when crossing into any kind of danger.
It doesn’t matter, can’t, and even if the impact
of that moment could be measured, we cannot say
with any certainty that Sara Albertson,
ten years after, could have resisted
making dainty track marks in the crook
of her elbow, between her toes, and I have heard,
when it was at its worst, into her eyes.
Who could have known, of the children
gathered in a circle, picking for a game of jacks,
that the ground on which they walked
had once been furrowed by a group of,
well, you-know-whos. Who among them
could have known? Well, really, any,
had they opened up their textbooks once,
had they heard their fathers say, If them
niggers keep comin’ we’re leavin’.
Without the plans for the school, now buried
in the county zoning office basement,
or some historical artifact that would give
the layout of the old plantation, it would be difficult
to say for sure if the fence they crawled under to escape
had been over by the baseball field
or by the lower meadow where the kindergarteners
played that game in gym with a parachute and tennis ball,
the children’s arms just barely strong enough
to send it lofting into the blue sky, and them too young
to know not to look directly at it, yellow and hanging
as if by magic, blinding as it reached the apex
of its flight. By Christmas break they would perfect
their method, the whole game now brought indoors,
the children trained to never look again.
You might say they failed to learn the only lesson
any one of them would have ever needed since: that if
anything on earth has earned the right to be observed
it is a thing of beauty while in flight.
You might say. You might say. You might.
Fighting out of West Virginia
There he is in the blue trunks in the corner. Eyes all aflutter. His face above the blue mat and the nose not gently folded over has the crowd all saying, “Thank God for cartilage and bone,” while feeling along those parts of their bodies that are as yet intact, the way people often do when confronted with disfigurement. The broken nose has earned him ten thousand dollars. Not the nose exactly, but the willingness to have it broken in the undercard fight of a second-rate tough-man show held three times a year in the Bluefield High School Gymnasium. But we did not wonder at the nose. We wondered at the disappearance of the four state semifinal football banners on the wall when the lights went out, and at the PA crackling with guitar riffs and a voice saying, “Bluefield, West Virginia! Are you ready?” How it put everybody in every shellacked timber bleacher bench into a frenzy. When the woman three rows down leaned in to her friend, flipped out her bangs knowingly and said, “The whole to-do comes from Roanoke,” we thought we were observers of some holy pilgrimage out of the east. Still, we did not wonder at the nose, for even in Bluefield doctors set broken bones. They come out of the mines all the time, out of the old railroad junction, sometimes out of the bars when boys from the Virginia side and boys from the West Virginia side start hollering into the streets on account of someone taking the name West by God Virginia in vain. And this boy, lying in the blue trunks in the corner, is no stranger to being broken. If we’d seen his face before the fight, if it had not been obscured by the flash of cheap carnival strobes, we would have seen the nose sitting on top of his face all askew like a shoal sticking out of the New River in the dry season. After the fight, the fine lights shipped in from Roanoke rest before the headline bout. The gym is illuminated only by its local splendor and the janitor in that yellow pall pushes a dry broom through the blood, the lines rough and straight across the mat like some misplaced Zen garden. And if we look at him in the corner, eyes still fluttering, we might also notice a tremor running from foot to ankle to knee. We might notice a few teeth dotting the dry-broomed blood beside him on the mat. We might look again at his eyes fluttering now, and because wonder is b
y no means married to consciousness, we might think of his sister waiting at the Travel America on Interstate 81, how she does not need ten thousand, only ten or twenty, because she has worked her way from OxyContin to meth. We might see her eyes fall on their father’s shaving strop, the shine dulling both love and luster from the father’s eyes before he raises up his hand with it. We might lastly stare out at this boy in the blue trunks in the corner as they carry him off with his nose broken and a little of his blood spilled out before hearing the announcer say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a hand for the loser, fighting out of West Virginia.” And it will be no great wonder to us that he smiles.
In the Ruins of the Ironworks
We had been looking for a sign and there it was:
the faded copper explaining that the iron of this place
was once known throughout
the South;
the nails, the pins, the wire; the things with which
to make machines; gleaming
instruments to single-row plow
the earth.
And past the sign: into the faint greased lubricant
smell of the foundry; into the crumbling
buildings,
where men once turned black from the smoke
that escaped the flues and made their bodies be
striped with soot
and sweat
as they smelted ingots, black and hot as the air
that rattled in their lungs
to give us
industry.
If, even past these remnants, we could see
the hill and the quarried stone where they perched
two cannons overlooking
the low river,
and the rocks, graffiti-covered and vast,
perhaps we truly would be told
that Michael still loves
Lou-Anne,
even if it was for only one night, with black
enamel spray paint in the heat
of a July evening
that they stroked and burned through
in ’83.
Songs in Planck Time
I rank first among all things
the new pine board
my father and I nailed
into the half-collapsing dock
that lurched out back then
when I was young
into the brackish end of the Mattaponi.
I seem to recall something obvious
about the way that one board
was devoid of natural qualities, was
out of place and undeveloped in time, was
as yet unweathered as was I, the reverse
of which is mere endurance, an impotent
going on; so add it to the list
of things that I am not, if something must
be done with it:
not the prince of any
even minor island. Not
and won’t be the hero of anybody’s story
but my own, if that. Not
the ripple moving outward, not
the flat of the oar that slapped the water,
not the sound it made that drove
every bird from every branch at once, not
the sky they darkened with
their flight. Not
my memory of you still on that long
walk to the end of the dock,
jumping over every missing timber
as if it might make a bit of difference when
you spread out your arms and paused, then
finally fell into the water. Not
even briefly any father’s son, not any
song we haven’t heard before.
The Abhorrence of Coincidence
Look, out there
that goddamn lame horse
kicks up just the most recent of
the newly dusted snow,
which forms into a pattern,
a small ellipsis underneath
the lightning-split dogwood tree
you tried to mend
with wood glue, bandages,
and a spool of rusty bailing wire,
the end result of which
was nothing more than a dead tree
adorned with the trappings
of some god-awful human injury.
You are out back by the barn now,
hammering nails into
eighty dollars’ worth of shoes
for that damn horse
you said we shouldn’t kill,
and I tap my finger on the window,
and see myself mirrored in
the nails you drove already,
and in the manner of the impertinent roan
who ran in circles in the snow
this afternoon and made
the dirt turn up, who turned
the snow a little brown, the one
you always lectured me about
never trying to ride.
I remember when we had
no horse, no pasture
in which it could trample earth
into a name, or if not a name
something that would instigate
my thinking on the time
I said your name
over and over again
as if it might be made
into a kind of destiny,
a destiny of saying, and being
said, and by me, as if
a pale ellipsis could of its own accord
resist its being covered
by a lame horse turning up
the dirt a little more,
and so I write your name now
in the breath I’ve left against
the glass, the need for tapping
gone, the surprise long passed
from your saying in the night
not names but something else,
not destiny but, Hell, if I was anywhere
but here I’d be just as much in love
with someone else,
and so I breathe again
and cover up
your name,
for I am not anywhere,
and I am not else.
While Trying to Make an Arrowhead in the Fashion of the Mattaponi Indians
We are born to be makers of crude tools.
And our speech is full of cruel
signifiers: you, me, them, us. I
am sure we will not survive.
No. I am only certain that the
pine trees that ring this lake in Virginia
are occasional, that I sit between them
at the water’s edge,
cast two stones against
each other and rest.
For we go down
through these
terrible hours
together.
Four
The Locks of the James
History isn’t over, in spite of our desire
for it to be. Even now, one can see
the windfall of leaves gathering
like lost baggage on the dirty pathways
paralleling the old canal, itself resurrected
in an attempt to reproduce a minor economic miracle
that had taken place in a similarly middling city
halfway across this continent. I walked the route
with my father on the day of its opening,
before the new commercial ventures gained
brief fame and the shops and music halls,
the apartments in the husks of once burnt
tobacco warehouses collectively became
the place to be. He pointed out the sheer scale
of the endeavor, the countless men it took to dig
the channels, the drivers of the boats, the ingenuity
of fixing all the mechanisms in place without
the aid of welding. A scale model of the working locks
could be operated by inserting a penny in a slot.
Two doors shut, the lower chamber f
illed
with water, ostensibly bringing a ship
laden with goods to the level of the next
enclosure, where it could, by all accounts,
navigate the waters beyond the fall line
out even to Ohio, with luck, beyond
the Mississippi. I only later learned
the scale model of the locks I’d played with
was the only working set the river had ever known,
the actual project having run into financial troubles,
driven into the ground by every brand
of huckster and charlatan one could imagine,
not to mention the fact that the railroads
had already made ten thousand men’s lifework
obsolete. And I wonder if I should be angry
that my father never mentioned this, that instead
of acknowledging the fact that this project had failed,
had been utterly doomed from the start, he’d made
a big production over the model boat that had gone
missing from the little plastic locks. What would he
have told me, as we sat carving newer, better boats
from peels of silver birch bark? What would he
have said as we watched the water raise them
and the doors to all that was beyond opened triumphantly
and we walked the three or four steps to the end
of the display, then started over? Anger
seems absurd, but so too does this effort
to recollect, to reconstruct a moment from my life
in miniature, knowing that a scale model can accomplish
nothing when the life-sized thing was never built,
knowing that everything in the world only reminds me
of something else. The last time I went