Return to Table of ContentsApril Fifth, Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Three
Brother came home in flood time, sudden
as the first heave of spring. That week
the river grew restless in its banks, tumbling
out chicken wire and empty bottles in its gorge.
Our house, too, strained, with one more in its tiny rooms:
Father, anxious and crop-hungry, paced the porch
as the waters rose, and Mother at the stove,
her face flushed, weathered our moods in silence.When the rains broke we worked the bottomland, Brother
sneaking into town at night, proud new muscles
under his thin shirt. One afternoon, the tobacco finally
in the ground, I hid as he met a girl at the end of the road,
imagined words I could not speak--like finding a piano
in the barn, this possibility wide and tense as storm.The River and Under the River
At dusk every day, our cattle leave the river,
single-file, trundling their weight to the upper pastures.
And, every night, the river is left to itself, infertile
and self-loathing, most beautiful when it comes close
to absence; its grooves and grottoes hum
with the noise of a landscape's slow consumption.
If I put my ear to the ground
could I hear the drag of the river turning
limestone into silt? Would it tell of Carlos pulled
through water on a slim and muscley night at Turnhole Bend?
I want to know the missing part of his story
that ends with the flush of foxfire on a grave--
as if from the body's heat fading out.
Tonight the river is at work dissolving, solving
over and over the riddle of its loosening. I want to know
how to hear it, and what it might teach me:
how to inhabit this thing of bone, gut, and blood,
this part of me that would not vanish if I vanished.Watermelons
Pestered with sprays
and bedded in straw,
we are kept boys, swollen
like a bum knee; we look
like the bullfrog sounds.
Plugged with a knife
or zippered open wide,
tapped for our flaming insides.
We are water clocks,
weaned from the tube-footed vine,
hauled in by the load,
a tear-striped dirty child.
We cannot spill.
We wish we could read
lightning on our hide,
the unhysterical thump
of a talking drum:
do not trust the speed of beauty
do not trust the beauty