Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting Page 3

  a fair approximation of the place as it existed,

  the long line of the esplanade falling off

  into the distances, perhaps the fine grey of

  the Pacific reaching through the uncertainty of fog,

  and then at night, the book of maps now left

  open on a table, I could create the bustle

  of a group of stars that never were. I’d be called

  lucky, or just dead wrong, and for a moment,

  motionless, I’d be clearly drawn to scale upon the page

  with just the clarity that I had hoped for, not knowing

  the fruitlessness of having clarity among one’s hopes.

  When the librarian called my name my name

  was made into a kind of spell, dispersing everything

  I could identify or claim as being part

  of one certain, undisputed me, the long walk

  down the hall as she held my hand, deferring

  every question I might ask until a later time,

  and I remember the bright red dust of dried-up clay

  that swung in liquid-looking rivulets as I sat

  in the parking lot and waited for my father’s Chevy to appear,

  knowing only that someone was dying, thinking only

  of the word embarcadero, any place other than the place

  I was forced to occupy in time and space, any name

  of any town whose weight could be abandoned

  with enough repeating, and giving up at last, the last

  of the other children gone, hearing in my father’s voice

  his philosophy of living, always buy a Chevy, son,

  those goddamn Fords are designed for obsolescence,

  the plan, see, is in five years it’ll break down

  and you’ll have to buy another, and I asked if it was like

  the broken bicycle he’d bought for me that we’d repaired

  one piece at a time until it worked, how when

  we screwed the last bolt onto the new sprocket

  the old bike was no longer there, everything replaced,

  the broken pieces set aside and what did it mean,

  and his face, which I remember over everything, lined

  with a map-like certainty of shame because he had no answer,

  offered none, and then the tracks of the Chevy’s tires

  turned up the dust again, the pine trees bright and luminous

  with their late spring blanketing of pollen underneath

  the unreal quality of light in which we lived, until I climbed

  into the seat beside him, that rag he had

  by then begun to cough into

  already resting on his knee.

  The Torch and Pitchfork Blues

  Whoever picks up the last of the thrown jacks

  while the ball still bounces off the pavement

  and hangs suspended in the kicked-up playground dust

  must also retrieve the history of the ground

  where it will land. There are rules. Tell us,

  boy, called out on eenie, if you

  have guessed them yet. Before there was

  brushed nickel there was iron, before

  Tommy Dunlap was pushed idly from the bus

  into that busy intersection, there was

  a plenitude of grief already. Measured

  against all that, a single incident recedes

  into no biggie, just a memory that will help

  to make his fourth-grade classmates cautious,

  for a time at least, until they can no longer take

  the weight of that third and fourth look down the street

  when crossing into any kind of danger.

  It doesn’t matter, can’t, and even if the impact

  of that moment could be measured, we cannot say

  with any certainty that Sara Albertson,

  ten years after, could have resisted

  making dainty track marks in the crook

  of her elbow, between her toes, and I have heard,

  when it was at its worst, into her eyes.

  Who could have known, of the children

  gathered in a circle, picking for a game of jacks,

  that the ground on which they walked

  had once been furrowed by a group of,

  well, you-know-whos. Who among them

  could have known? Well, really, any,

  had they been even half-aware in class,

  had they opened up their textbooks once,

  had they heard their fathers say, If them

  niggers keep comin’ we’re leavin’.

  Without the plans for the school, now buried

  in the county zoning office basement,

  or some historical artifact that would give

  the layout of the old plantation, it would be difficult

  to say for sure if the fence they crawled under to escape

  had been over by the baseball field

  or by the lower meadow where the kindergarteners

  played that game in gym with a parachute and tennis ball,

  the children’s arms just barely strong enough

  to send it lofting into the blue sky, and them too young

  to know not to look directly at it, yellow and hanging

  as if by magic, blinding as it reached the apex

  of its flight. By Christmas break they would perfect

  their method, the whole game now brought indoors,

  the children trained to never look again.

  You might say they failed to learn the only lesson

  any one of them would have ever needed since: that if

  anything on earth has earned the right to be observed

  it is a thing of beauty while in flight.

  You might say. You might say. You might.

  Fighting out of West Virginia

  There he is in the blue trunks in the corner. Eyes all aflutter. His face above the blue mat and the nose not gently folded over has the crowd all saying, “Thank God for cartilage and bone,” while feeling along those parts of their bodies that are as yet intact, the way people often do when confronted with disfigurement. The broken nose has earned him ten thousand dollars. Not the nose exactly, but the willingness to have it broken in the undercard fight of a second-rate tough-man show held three times a year in the Bluefield High School Gymnasium. But we did not wonder at the nose. We wondered at the disappearance of the four state semifinal football banners on the wall when the lights went out, and at the PA crackling with guitar riffs and a voice saying, “Bluefield, West Virginia! Are you ready?” How it put everybody in every shellacked timber bleacher bench into a frenzy. When the woman three rows down leaned in to her friend, flipped out her bangs knowingly and said, “The whole to-do comes from Roanoke,” we thought we were observers of some holy pilgrimage out of the east. Still, we did not wonder at the nose, for even in Bluefield doctors set broken bones. They come out of the mines all the time, out of the old railroad junction, sometimes out of the bars when boys from the Virginia side and boys from the West Virginia side start hollering into the streets on account of someone taking the name West by God Virginia in vain. And this boy, lying in the blue trunks in the corner, is no stranger to being broken. If we’d seen his face before the fight, if it had not been obscured by the flash of cheap carnival strobes, we would have seen the nose sitting on top of his face all askew like a shoal sticking out of the New River in the dry season. After the fight, the fine lights shipped in from Roanoke rest before the headline bout. The gym is illuminated only by its local splendor and the janitor in that yellow pall pushes a dry broom through the blood, the lines rough and straight across the mat like some misplaced Zen garden. And if we look at him in the corner, eyes still fluttering, we might also notice a tremor running from foot to ankle to knee. We might notice a few teeth dotting the dry-broomed blood beside him on the mat. We might look again at his eyes fluttering now, and because wonder is b
y no means married to consciousness, we might think of his sister waiting at the Travel America on Interstate 81, how she does not need ten thousand, only ten or twenty, because she has worked her way from OxyContin to meth. We might see her eyes fall on their father’s shaving strop, the shine dulling both love and luster from the father’s eyes before he raises up his hand with it. We might lastly stare out at this boy in the blue trunks in the corner as they carry him off with his nose broken and a little of his blood spilled out before hearing the announcer say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a hand for the loser, fighting out of West Virginia.” And it will be no great wonder to us that he smiles.

  In the Ruins of the Ironworks

  We had been looking for a sign and there it was:

  the faded copper explaining that the iron of this place

  was once known throughout

  the South;

  the nails, the pins, the wire; the things with which

  to make machines; gleaming

  instruments to single-row plow

  the earth.

  And past the sign: into the faint greased lubricant

  smell of the foundry; into the crumbling

  buildings,

  where men once turned black from the smoke

  that escaped the flues and made their bodies be

  striped with soot

  and sweat

  as they smelted ingots, black and hot as the air

  that rattled in their lungs

  to give us

  industry.

  If, even past these remnants, we could see

  the hill and the quarried stone where they perched

  two cannons overlooking

  the low river,

  and the rocks, graffiti-covered and vast,

  perhaps we truly would be told

  that Michael still loves

  Lou-Anne,

  even if it was for only one night, with black

  enamel spray paint in the heat

  of a July evening

  that they stroked and burned through

  in ’83.

  Songs in Planck Time

  I rank first among all things

  the new pine board

  my father and I nailed

  into the half-collapsing dock

  that lurched out back then

  when I was young

  into the brackish end of the Mattaponi.

  I seem to recall something obvious

  about the way that one board

  was devoid of natural qualities, was

  out of place and undeveloped in time, was

  as yet unweathered as was I, the reverse

  of which is mere endurance, an impotent

  going on; so add it to the list

  of things that I am not, if something must

  be done with it:

  not the prince of any

  even minor island. Not

  and won’t be the hero of anybody’s story

  but my own, if that. Not

  the ripple moving outward, not

  the flat of the oar that slapped the water,

  not the sound it made that drove

  every bird from every branch at once, not

  the sky they darkened with

  their flight. Not

  my memory of you still on that long

  walk to the end of the dock,

  jumping over every missing timber

  as if it might make a bit of difference when

  you spread out your arms and paused, then

  finally fell into the water. Not

  even briefly any father’s son, not any

  song we haven’t heard before.

  The Abhorrence of Coincidence

  Look, out there

  that goddamn lame horse

  kicks up just the most recent of

  the newly dusted snow,

  which forms into a pattern,

  a small ellipsis underneath

  the lightning-split dogwood tree

  you tried to mend

  with wood glue, bandages,

  and a spool of rusty bailing wire,

  the end result of which

  was nothing more than a dead tree

  adorned with the trappings

  of some god-awful human injury.

  You are out back by the barn now,

  hammering nails into

  eighty dollars’ worth of shoes

  for that damn horse

  you said we shouldn’t kill,

  and I tap my finger on the window,

  and see myself mirrored in

  the nails you drove already,

  and in the manner of the impertinent roan

  who ran in circles in the snow

  this afternoon and made

  the dirt turn up, who turned

  the snow a little brown, the one

  you always lectured me about

  never trying to ride.

  I remember when we had

  no horse, no pasture

  in which it could trample earth

  into a name, or if not a name

  something that would instigate

  my thinking on the time

  I said your name

  over and over again

  as if it might be made

  into a kind of destiny,

  a destiny of saying, and being

  said, and by me, as if

  a pale ellipsis could of its own accord

  resist its being covered

  by a lame horse turning up

  the dirt a little more,

  and so I write your name now

  in the breath I’ve left against

  the glass, the need for tapping

  gone, the surprise long passed

  from your saying in the night

  not names but something else,

  not destiny but, Hell, if I was anywhere

  but here I’d be just as much in love

  with someone else,

  and so I breathe again

  and cover up

  your name,

  for I am not anywhere,

  and I am not else.

  While Trying to Make an Arrowhead in the Fashion of the Mattaponi Indians

  We are born to be makers of crude tools.

  And our speech is full of cruel

  signifiers: you, me, them, us. I

  am sure we will not survive.

  No. I am only certain that the

  pine trees that ring this lake in Virginia

  are occasional, that I sit between them

  at the water’s edge,

  cast two stones against

  each other and rest.

  For we go down

  through these

  terrible hours

  together.

  Four

  The Locks of the James

  History isn’t over, in spite of our desire

  for it to be. Even now, one can see

  the windfall of leaves gathering

  like lost baggage on the dirty pathways

  paralleling the old canal, itself resurrected

  in an attempt to reproduce a minor economic miracle

  that had taken place in a similarly middling city

  halfway across this continent. I walked the route

  with my father on the day of its opening,

  before the new commercial ventures gained

  brief fame and the shops and music halls,

  the apartments in the husks of once burnt

  tobacco warehouses collectively became

  the place to be. He pointed out the sheer scale

  of the endeavor, the countless men it took to dig

  the channels, the drivers of the boats, the ingenuity

  of fixing all the mechanisms in place without

  the aid of welding. A scale model of the working locks

  could be operated by inserting a penny in a slot.

  Two doors shut, the lower chamber f
illed

  with water, ostensibly bringing a ship

  laden with goods to the level of the next

  enclosure, where it could, by all accounts,

  navigate the waters beyond the fall line

  out even to Ohio, with luck, beyond

  the Mississippi. I only later learned

  the scale model of the locks I’d played with

  was the only working set the river had ever known,

  the actual project having run into financial troubles,

  driven into the ground by every brand

  of huckster and charlatan one could imagine,

  not to mention the fact that the railroads

  had already made ten thousand men’s lifework

  obsolete. And I wonder if I should be angry

  that my father never mentioned this, that instead

  of acknowledging the fact that this project had failed,

  had been utterly doomed from the start, he’d made

  a big production over the model boat that had gone

  missing from the little plastic locks. What would he

  have told me, as we sat carving newer, better boats

  from peels of silver birch bark? What would he

  have said as we watched the water raise them

  and the doors to all that was beyond opened triumphantly

  and we walked the three or four steps to the end

  of the display, then started over? Anger

  seems absurd, but so too does this effort

  to recollect, to reconstruct a moment from my life

  in miniature, knowing that a scale model can accomplish

  nothing when the life-sized thing was never built,

  knowing that everything in the world only reminds me

  of something else. The last time I went