Cured

for Albert Goldbarth

Albert, I’m here to tell you

Bluefield, Virginia has the best bacon

in the eastern U.S. I know

you’ve never been there, but it’s the kind

of place you might visit on a Sunday,

clear blue sky and mountain ridges frosted,

when all the evangelicals in their aging

chapels and strip mall sanctuaries are off to pray

that folks like you and me won’t turn

their fruitful lands into a salty waste,

and you’d be left alone

or nearly so, in the only diner

open on a Sunday morning. Just like me

you’d be lured in by the satisfying

aromas of peppered pork belly, the sensation

of eating the blistered fat of swine.

We wouldn’t care that it was spiritually unclean,

or that all it touched was unclean,

the unclean plate, the unclean scrambled eggs,

the filthy toast and jam, the way our fingers

lathered in its fatty sweetness

were unclean, or our mouths unclean,

or the BLT we’d order to take

with us, piled high in bacon, unclean.

And later, as we walked the empty streets

before the local parishioners labored out

to find their way home to sanctified roasts

they’d ravage from pristine platters,

you and I and our friends would grow hungrier

and hungrier as we’d compare the subtle flavors

of acorn and truffle, the sugary-salty depth of pig.

Then you’d quote from Su Shi, Martial,

or Matthews’ sensuous song of swine,

“Sooey Generous,” and we’d agree that eventually

we’ll all be offered up on one altar or another,

salted with fire and smoke, salted with age, salted

in baths, entering a covenant of salt, cured,

if you will, of any worries about what might

come to pass tomorrow. And knowing this life

is the one life and wanting to make the most of it,

we’d pick up a glass of very cold, very sweet tea

at the Dairy Queen, and we’d unwrap our sandwiches,

drink deeply from the cup, and eat of the crispy flesh,

satisfied celebrants of this porcine priesthood.

Mingo County Men

When I knew them as boys

shooting spit wads at Principal Martin

and sneaking peeks at the fishnet hose

of our young 4th grade teacher Ms. McCall,

they already sneered like grown men

with jobs as haul truck drivers

or longwall miners for Independence Coal.

They already had wives whose girlhood

dreams had fallen flat as cakes

dislodged from Easy Bake Ovens,

whose cheerleader smiles were swapped

for a Bud and a bottle of Oxy.

Even then, slipping on sneakers

instead of steel-toed boots, their houses had an air

of lumberyard sawdust and coal-tar pitch.

Their lunches carried the stench of onions

and potted meat. Their hands, stained yellow

by Camels they’d snatch from their father’s packs,

were already calloused and gashed.

And how they dropped then crushed

the finished butts beneath their feet

said failure; though, they still stood,

that harness of smoke encircling them, watching

and waiting for their futures to begin.

Gestation

Above plowed rows, the sun turned hot and sour

while she tested the shade of maple leaves.

Pregnant and sweating from her morning’s labor,

bushel basket of beans to snap and freeze,

she rocked the front porch glider.

Its song, phrased more with rust than metal,

suggested all days are brief and passing.

Flies hummed in fresh-turned compost and manure

which each spring constructed her garden.

Corn and squash she’d can and shelve, would soon

come on, then later she’d pickle crocks of beets.

Meanwhile, the child inside her wrenched and kicked,

and, years before they’d wake, cancer cells deep

inside her breasts cleaved to their fertile sleep.

Curse Poem

It would be easy at the end of a day

of demoralizing disappointments

and misanthropic misdemeanors, to let loose

with a series of fucks, motherfucks,

and goddamns. Science even suggests

it might make us feel better

if not force the world to make sense.

It’s what my son assumed when he was seven

and with his mother when they nearly came,

as my high school coach, most vulgar man

I ever knew, used to say, as close

as a “cunt hair” to a head-on collision.

He turned to his mother, both breathless with fear

and said, “It makes me want to say something bad.”

“Go ahead,” she offered, which he did,

his first F-bomb exploding its syllabic shrapnel

across the dashboard. For a moment,

he did feel better. Though feeling better

is not what this poem is about. Or feeling worse

for that matter. This is a poem about language,

words to be specific, and how they can profess love

or rage, how they can enlighten or disguise,

endear or destroy. How a 15-year-old girl, alone

and living on the streets can be convinced

to perform acts she couldn’t have imagined

by a pimp sharing a bubble-gum pink Icee,

and telling her, in the words she’d longed to hear

from her country-clubbing mother

and cheating father, “I understand you.”

Maybe we all are cursed by our various lexicons,

cursed to describe and explain, cursed to extol,

cursed to pretend. Cursed as much

by the start-of-day “good morning”

as we are by the close-of-day “good night.”

Cursed to believe we can comprehend any of it.

There are, of course, those who say words are incapable

of expressing meaning, or mean

something other than what we try to express.

Jeffrey Eugenides suggests we need

“Germanic train-car constructions” in place of single word emotions.

No room for joy, but rather “the happiness that attends disaster.”

Maybe the long-married couple piled into their

king-sized bed, all that empty space around them, have it right.

She’s watching the Late Show with Stephen Colbert

and he’s reading Anna Karenina considering

how “there are no conditions to which a person

cannot grow accustomed.” He’s listening to her laugh

at jokes not nearly as funny as his own when he wonders

why they practice what not to say until they say nothing

effortlessly. And why not this silence,

given there never were enough words,

or the right words for love’s many hungers.

Yet, it’s words a son tries to find at his mother’s death bed.

She’s gone, at least her mind is, and she’s lost

all words by now, can’t say them, can’t form them

on her dried lips, possibly can’t even recognize them,

and still he’s looking for the right ones. He knows

he’ll remember these words even if she won’t.

He knows he’ll take them with him after

others have said more words in the church,

and more words by the grave, and late at night

months and even years later he’ll wake to those

syllables, each vowel of pain, each consonant of guilt

forming a sentence that sours on the tongue.

And in that night he’ll hear his mother’s voice

as he did as a child when he’d cursed her for being his mother.

“I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth,

that thou shalt be dumb,” a kind of curse she repeated

as she forced his head to the sink, lifted the soap,

and scoured every word from his mouth.

Refugee

We all know a little something of exile,

the way the sun abandons January,

the exodus of wrens from jasmine

in late August. For the Alzheimer’s patient

the body is a foreign land and every face

a stranger’s. My mother-in-law’s

exile sighs along gated walls

and vanishes beyond the front door

like all the beaches she ever walked.

It picks the locks in her dreams at night,

steals each memory and texture,

then scatters them, salting the earth.

Waking Alone After Drinking Too Much Wine in Umbria

after Li Po

Jasmine rises on the backs of sun-soaked walls

while swifts and swallows perfect a calligraphy of wind and wing.

Not much of a hangover to speak of, there is little

to worry me, save an abandoned skirt

mocking from its laundry line.

The scent of coffee lingers in doorways

and alleys the sun works ceaselessly to fill.

Beside me on the balcony, the oleander

in its cracked pot grows too large, refuses

to be tamed, refuses to hide in shadow

when there is so much Mediterranean light.

When I notice its bloom is more the deep claret

of autumn than the crimson of August,

I imagine I hear flies in the tomato fields,

vines drying and fruit beginning to blacken,

rotting from bottom to stem.

And afraid to find one more life to grieve,

I grab my glass, pour another drink of wine large enough

to give reason to laugh with whatever joy

I have left, then wait for the evening

silhouette of swifts to startle my heart

into some other life.

Considering the Continued Use of Insects as Literary Metaphors

after Hayden Carruth

So many of them crushed beneath a boot,

captured and released from a grandmother’s tissue,

slurped up in evening hatches by brown

and cutthroat trout. And so many poems

about them, and most of those concerning

love and grief, those two heart-sore twins

we seem unable to understand without

the metaphorical biting mandibles of hopper

and tick, the piercing sting of wasp:

Donne’s flea, Keats’s cricket, Dickinson’s buzzing fly,

and Neruda’s lust-filled generic crawler

making its way across a lover’s hip, to name a few.

So many, in fact, it’s hard to calculate

the reams of paper it has taken to print them all.

Still that number doesn’t come close

to matching the population in this one

nest of fire ants bustling just beyond

my summer hammock. All of us,

meaning humans, don’t add up

to the ant colonies populating one square mile

in any home town. Yet, without them,

the world would fall apart. That can’t be

said for us. Let some pandemic virus

wipe us out and the world keeps going,

flourishing even. This is why,

towering above these ants

with my can of Raid, I consider what

a waste of effort this is, what a waste

of life, not just theirs but my own,

which, pandemic or not, is ending

faster than I’d like. And I find myself

giving way to grief and sorrow,

like so many others. This,

I say out loud to the insects,

is the finishing off of humankind.

They show no interest in my declarations,

ignoring me with the same lack of devotion

reserved for other ignored gods

before they disappeared into the booklice-

riddled pages of epic and myth. I don’t know

if insects understand. I don’t know if they wake

at night to name the constellations,

or grieve those drowned by flooding storms.

But I’m pretty sure they won’t write poems

about me and my hammock afternoons,

nor consider my hands and mouth

as metaphors for colony collapse,

nor pause from all their constant work,

when the last man or woman passes

beyond the need for rhyme and simile,

to say goodbye.

What Remains

Here in the garden with arugula wilted,

blackberries finished, and snow peas not quite ready,

we’re pulling weeds and suckering tomatoes.

Tossing blighted plants to one pile for burning, ripened

Romas, knotted and imperfect, to the other pile

for canning, I consider how so much of our marriage

followed this ritual, a paring down of clutter,

a culling and clarifying of what we needed

from each other. Pausing to wipe sweat from your cheek,

you check your reflection in the spade, catch me admiring.

Later, I’ll write this moment down so it remains

no matter what we lose or fail to remember.

For now we work quietly in mild morning heat,

the winter we know will arrive still distant and restrained.

Why I Browse the Hardware Store

The wonder of the Home Depot is how common

all the wonders really are, nails and hammers,

wrenches of a dozen types, screws and pipes.

Each tool fashioned to a purpose, capable of assembly

and disassembly, of resolving any complication

with a simplicity of action we could easily

define as a form of beauty.

Walking the aisles this late winter morning,

considering unfinished work

the coming spring will want addressed,

I remember an earlier hardware store,

the lumberyard lovers parked behind,

the marvels of strawberry-scented hair

filling the Ford, how my high school girlfriend’s camisole

rested so soft beneath my clumsy hands

for a moment I was confused as to what was

satin and what was flesh,

and how each day since, I’ve lived exposed

to love’s ceremonies I rarely understand.

Though, honestly, that was a time before love,

before I’d heard any man or boy I knew

speak it, except maybe to describe

a game-winning tackle on a Friday night.

I’d heard fathers gathered around a picnic table

discuss a porterhouse in ways that elevated it

to a state of loveliness, and their sons

did the same beneath a Camaro’s polished hood,

holding pliers and spark plug wrenches

in their grease-caked hands.

That was before I’d discovered Coltrane or Ravel,

before John Donne rested on my nightstand.

I knew nothing of the longing of Botticelli,

or the beauty of women in their morning robes

sipping coffee and buttering toast.

But I’d seen and heard women alone

listening to Patsy Cline on the turntable

sing I Fall to Pieces.

I’d seen them cry, body-shaking,

chest-gasping sobs that splintered a life

into more fragments than vice or nail

could hold together.

And I’d wanted to reach for them, tell them it,

whatever it was, would be okay.

I’d wanted to say the word love

in the hope that it would open into them

like a stent, fill all those fractures.

But that was never what was needed.

The heart in its tenuous frame

can’t shape love square and plumb.

Which is why I’m browsing the garden center

for mulch and fertilizer, for pruning shears and spade

my wife will want. She hasn’t given up

on the jasmine and lilies in our hard clay soil,

the ones that somehow overcame both

the summer-long drought we thought

would burn it all, and the late-winter floods

we believed nothing could survive,

especially those delicate petals, light

as a camisole cast off by lovers’ hands.

Pickling Crock

My god the smell could waste you.

Even the flies turned up their noses

and flew off to barns and pasture.

Our brine-stung lungs would fester

breathing the vinegary rot. We’d open windows,

still, my god, the smell would waste you.

So each cabbage and cuke could sour into rapture,

the women understood more than others,

their men and children off in barns and pasture,

the importance of salt and patience to avoid disaster:

pickles slick and soft as minnows

with a taste and smell that could waste you.

Today, unsealing a jar after trying to master

my mother’s recipe, I think how memory opens

on the tongue and nose, images of barns and pastures,

where close but not exact results in disappointing gestures.

So don’t compare, I think. Enjoy what chance exposes:

the pleasure of kraut so pungent it could waste you

for anything sweet, memory of pickles savored by barn or pasture.