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On Heroes and Hero
Worship
And then a hero stumbles by, dragging the exile stone
behind him, dredging a path through history’s
red clay, his forced march into virtues
no one can use: mumbling something about certainty
and the course to be stayed, the race to stay
in place or keep another there, where the burnt
offerings
are buried, and the quicklime laid so they’ll stay
dead. The rhyme of blood and iron
rings half-true, guns and butter
grease the slope and down
he goes, a ceremony of extinctions
assembled on the cheap, avalanche
of sedimentary rocks all shaped like
shoeless soldiers. He dusts
his conscience off, and walks
into another room where he’s the hero.
Days Like
Survival
Beginning in the midst of things
that split or burn or tear the skin
with happenstance, this elegant, unkempt earth
of rust and dust, smashed cat and armadillo
roadkill, abandoned pickup trucks
blocking the berm. A fine scum of rumor and pine pollen
coats cars and sidewalks, spring’s clumsy fingers
smear the seen with allergens: the predictable machinery
cranks up and body opens into morning
damage done and not yet done, the hector and the haze
of early. Open the kitchen window, wait for its
drift and settle; open the front door that won’t lock
properly, walk out with calcium-deficient bones, a
rising
viral load, testing degrees of never
that set the temperature as something more
than temperate. Pause now, breathe in
an air of joblessness, its daylong sickly-sweet
catch in the throat. Warm
chapped hands at the world, welcome spring
with floods and heavy snows
across the continental weather zone,
a lingering low-pressure system’s states
of insecurity, far west of this here and now
awash with these azaleas’ purples,
pinks, and whites, these late camellia reds.
September Songs
1
As we drove home through sun
-drowned afternoon, two immature white
ibises (brown with a touch
of gray, white throats, white heads, or so
you said, though I saw only dun and dark)
foraged a flooded field beside the turn-off
to the Mississippi Welcome Center, next rest
area 65 miles. Recent rain had made a lake
of lawn between three trees (the rain itself
gone for days), some temporary
roadside eden. I asked you
what they were and you pointed out
two snowy egrets, my birds
mere background, shadows
of that white poise, picking their way
through shallow and shallower
days. You didn’t see the ibises
until we left, couldn’t name my
descriptions, describing names
I knew already. It’s a long, long way.
2
We have seen occasion and moved on,
the curtain of rain descends again
(some sound of water falling):
torn screen door, torn paper hat,
a torn black plastic garbage bag
ballooned in a corner of the front yard
while trees engage in their seasonal murder
of leaves, the ovate brittle ocher evidence
littering lawns and driveways. Backyard
mower mulch and ornamental elephant
ears, a white tool shed painted
off-white, grass after grass until there’s nothing
to be seen. I pull rain through dry fingers,
dry hair and dry eyes; leaves’
tapered drip points bow to wet weather.
3
The nothing that’s always happening,
sirens and the jaded sea, a fire somewhere
I can’t see (some smoke
gets in my ears), an ambulance
demanding right of way on Nine Mile
Road to someone’s near-fatal
accident, dressed up in mortality
and tinted coins of safety glass,
a creased and crumpled car
with a Jesus fish hooked to the trunk
gasping for air. I pull over to the side
and watch emergency pass on
its soundtrack for the present tense,
continue on my way to walking
the beach where green waves make time
out of tides and wind, color so true
it looks artificial, sand shuffling up
and down the slope into the Gulf,
engulfed and then released, uncertain
whether to drink or to drown.
The New Life
I woke in the middle of a wooded
trailer park (in the middle
of somebody’s lies), lying mired in a muddle
about where I was, with nothing
I could call my own: no shoes, no shirt, no pants,
no socks, no job or occupation, income
none. Wrecked mobile homes
on either side hinted at ruin
come and gone astray, what might return
for dinner, bringing friends
and friends of friends. The earth dressed down
in withered grasses and crashed trees, pine straw
and rusted household appliances,
made a welcome for me, made a grave
to mock me back to sleep. Raw sunlight
ignited my dissolving bones,
buried me alive in my disintegrating
body. How long it takes not to move.
My tarnished-penny idioms discoloring
unfinished loam, knife-edged
and neverward, I decided
not to die that day, made my mobility
my theme: stood up to red-clay dust
and downed corrugated fencing, uncollected
with the other storm debris.
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