ASHES
Late in line, squeezing, I tore
the side mirror off the car
I'd stopped to wash. Winter's soot
had followed soap and water
through the service station drain,
and I'd chanced slick white three miles
up the boulevard to mourning.
This time it was bone cancer,
a cousin calling to explain
the skeleton's implosion,
the possibilties for pain.
"He was halfway to ashes,"
I heard, jostling what I'd read
about morticians who burn
multiple bodies, the one
in California who stored
a miscellany of ashes
in fifty-five gallon drums.
My mirror drooped to uselessness;
we suffered the pieties
of folk songs, the contracted
homily of the minister.
We sang and sang through four hymns
about resurrection meant to
reinforce like testimony
while I thought about morticians
who might need reserves of ashes
to fill the urns of liars,
who won't burn, according to some,
because they're unforgiven.
There, on that program's cover,
the sacred heart of Jesus
in flames lifted symmetrically
toward heaven; and there, after
that funeral, among family
who thought the ashes they carried
were charged with gospel promise,
I wanted to examine
the locked, unlettered basement
of that funeral director,
look for the enormous drum
of gray, powdered hopelessness.
I wanted to roll it down
the cracked drive where seal after seal
of tar spidered toward the street.
And I wanted to lift fistfuls
of the past, interpret them
like ancient verses, flinging ash
over the ordered, washed cars
of relatives so they might drive
that anthology of dust
to the thirteen states they'd come from,
like colonists, to line themselves
under the single flag of faith.
INCUBUS
Swollen on camera,
a woman claims Satan,
disguised as her husband,
drove home after work
and abused her. How clever,
she says, my helpmate
a pastor, these bruises
twice awful from devil's fists.
Within a week, walking
nearsighted by the school
they attend, I've mistaken
my son and my daughter
for strangers. "Dad?" Shannon
worried; "Hey!" Derek said,
both calling to me
from a limbo of fog.
And only this morning,
I measured the pre-dawn
like an Easter priest,
something walking the yard,
something taking a minute
with the door, yet the dog
refusing to bark.
Whatever was below me
needed no lights, declined
the stairs. The dog, so like
the one who's lived here ten years,
circled to curl on the carpet.
I waited for footsteps,
the hush of the door to the room
where they'd stay, someone I know
transforming if everything's
possessed in a uniform way.
LOST CONTINENTS
Besides Atlantis, there are lost continents,
Lemuria and Mu, which are claimed to be
beneath the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Except for the last owners who stall the arrival
of eminent domain,
everyone has died or driven back for this evening
of porches, of chairs
not packed, not all of them, by the old women who sit
to shame the bulldozers.
And what can I say to three of them settled in front
of filmed windows where
a future of double lanes will please commuters? That ruin
is the word for developers?
That they level and build in the great sentimentality
of progress? In the first
Empty lot of the wrecker, I scrape my shoes and say nothing
about the nostalgia of men
who search for continents dropped miles beneath the oceans,
not settling for Atlantis,
so serious about our storybook origins, someone, not far
from this street, finances
a search for Lemuria, the lost continent of the Indian Ocean.
I say nothing
about the men who wish to set the winch of wishful thinking
to the weight of Mu,
raise that shipwrecked world from beneath the Pacific
for its possible
treasures of myth. I could say these are two more sites
for the Garden of Eden,
for the fossils fortunate to belief. That while they dry,
while those new continents
open to seeds and release their spirits to the off-shore
faithful, your daughters
will drive over a thousand sites of lost things, arrive
at the rented rooms
of attempted memory, their daughters, in turn, repeating "What?"
as they marvel
and brush themselves like the lucky at crash sites, listening
to the old tales
of emigration when the oceans, accordingly, rose, when
the displaced seas
sloshed up the coasts with the great dreams of bonding.
That someone will
surely unscroll a prophecy scrawled in the waterproof words
of a mother tongue.
That someone will verify its age and translate. That someone
will fund search
after search for a swath of definitive relics while the world
moves inland
to begin the long wait for the resurrected landscape, something
like these women
singing the ancient round of What's Happened, while I
solo conjecture:
Let me listen to these women saying "See?" in the terse tongue
of the experienced.
Let me enter the posted shops to buy one of everything
in the great gesture
of stupid charity. Let me walk away with a hundred beer cans
for a basement shelf,
a miscellany of painted animals. Let me sit for shoe repair,
stumble on the sudden lift
of heels. Let me climb the steep street to the overlook
soon to be blasted.
Let me balance on the rail which bears my name and the names
of a thousand children
who signed the low wall of romanticism. Let me step up
to teeter over everything
about to be buried. And let me challenge my balance while
I memorize the landfill
where our children will send sons of themselves to test this mud
of possible heaven;
and whether settled or not, to excavate its shale for the bones
for the bones of paradise.
And, if nothing, that they travel to the next long-buried town,
carry the cumulative fear
of faith to dive for the lost world not yet named.
SAUERKRAUT
Nancy Housel, for my first date, took me
To a sauerkraut dinner. In the basement
Of her white church, the Presbyterian
Women's bible class served us slabs of pork,
Baked beans, and mounds of sauerkraut so huge
We weren't embarrassed to mash them into
Flat fields of waste. We sat at a table
For six as if we were the grandchildren
Of the old foursome who asked us questions
We needed to answer to pass fifth grade.
They quizzed us on five wars, state capitals,
And the Presidents, in order, ending
With Eisenhower who would be voted
Back in the following day. I voted
For pumpkin pie, not apple, and walked home
With Nancy Housel, nobody over
The age of twelve within a hundred yards
Of us. We talked about the blue lyrics
Of Hank Ballard and Webster's vague clues for
Our sexual selves. The last things we'd said
To those couples had been test sites, fallout,
Wind direction, rain. The women had pursed
Their lips; the men had shoveled the last strands
Of sauerkraut into lumps. Commie talk,
One said, and Nancy Housel, just before
We reached the end of her shadowed driveway,
Called me Red and lifted her laughter to
My smile for the first small test of desire.
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Poetry, Part II
Poetry, Part III - The Doors of Hell
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Poetry from The Literary Review