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from
Anger And The Creature Under God
VILLAGE
OUTING
From
a day-room darkness
we brace for bright sunlight, file out
in a crooked line, like the one we
make inside, that staggers
to the glass cage
where they pass out rainbow pellets
with water in three-ounce paper cups.
Three
cow-pokes alongside,
we walk the grounds in yellow thorazine fog
stumbling paths we know by heart.
We sulk past the label-makers store
that name-branded our clothes
then sent them back with wrinkles
mangled in.
Tilt our heads five stories up
toward the T-group window, where we
role-play once a week, gazing distended pupils
in wordless communication, longing to trust
words
and comfort
from a circle of strangers, to rock
in a cradle of lifted palms.
When
old fears still grip like clingstone
we tremble but ask the forbidden questions:
Did
our mothers ever really love us?
Did our fathers have the right to know us
like that? And is there a God up there
somewhere, really?
We pull
our gathered guilt from the still
deep place, and shred it until it scatters
like shrapnel.
And take back our shattered lives
group at the ancient quilt frame
handed down by our silent mothers.
That old silence also broken
we chatter like magpies as we stitch
the pieces, scrap by scrap,
into winter cover.
from
Gaps
...
I was
a good little girl.
I loved my mother without complication.
I never lusted after my father's nakedness.
Yet I'm in a rut on a long dusty road
so spread your cloak
or step over lightly. For I am
the keloid healing of an unclean break
moving forward on knitted bone.
A broken sky.
A patchwork.
One thing or another is always missing.
from
Once She Finds Her Tongue
...
Once
the seal of silence breaks
there's no stopping her rash of words
and no time to hone the jagged edges
of recollections that fly
like birchwood chips
from the axe's blade:
the backwater, bog and bermuda grass
of Mississippi deltas, cotton-
chopping to the rhythm of a lazy-bird
song that promises death;
the ping of a rock against her daddy's hoe;
the body of a whiteboy dangling on the end
of a rope, from a high beam in the barn,
three days dead and buckram stiff;
a scar from a cotton worm sting
everybody takes for a birthmark
near the place on her wrist marked
for her own unbled lacerations.
Annual things:
A sad knot of tight faces gathered
in the flood plain of a river that
spits up black bodies
each Spring when the rains come.
A town born out of a way-station
for north- and south-bound trains,
a depot struggling up
like a blighted elder
and straggling as a drunk
down sunglazed rails, yet
never growing past the braking point
for the ten thirty-seven from Goodman.
A possum town playing dead
in noonday suns.
And the thing lost
behind the limp-lace lids
of that sad-eyed house by the tracks,
child-drawings scratched in the dirt
of a grassless yard,
with Loddie Redmann on the corner
selling love with juicy smiles,
buying devotion with silver coins--
Loddie-girl, bareheaded in December.
And Crazy Aunt Ida running through
the narrow streets, buck naked in
broad daylight, screaming:
FIRE IN THE WALLS! FIRE IN THE WALLS! O-O-H!
SOMEBODY TAKE ME TO THE WATER!
All the broad-shouldered, square-jawed
women with cracked crowns
from
God-Box Trilogy
GOSGRAIN
Here
where asylum is given the old
and unreconciled, where black and white
merges gray and sameness rules,
we approach the true enemy.
We dare not turn over in our sleep
not to be accused of sedition
and so get up every morning
on the same side of the bed.
Whether we've been good or bad,
we get the same steel gray sausage
for breakfast, and we eat it in
the same steel gray kitchen.
Though introspection in deepest honesty
is no longer a virtue,
we admit a certain comfort under these gray skies.
No more
weeping the long lost years
loving the wrong enemies, worshipping the wrong gods.
Having consented to love equally the lesser,
we need give supreme unction only to The One.
We accept those consolatory little pats on the head--
there, there, nothing done in love
can be all that bad, now can it?
We have
sung the last New Gospel.
Though we split the corners
of our mouths to do it
we have taken it in, swallowed down
this final time. No more revisions,
no more New Standard versions.
From now on, we sleep the sleep of true innocents.
In the morning, removing the bit from our sharpened
narrow teeth, we wait.
We will go for the throat of the
first cowpoke who comes
to prod us awake.
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