The Low Passions

by Anders Carlson-Wee

  She’s basically comatose, but she can shake

  her head for no and you’d be surprised

  how much power that gives you.

  They had her hooked up to this thing—

  I don’t know what you call it—a shock

  treatment kind of thing they hoped

  would give her back her speech. But when

  they explained all this she shook her head.

  Doc said shake once for yes and four for no.

  If the math wasn’t happening I coulda

  called the shots, but you know damn well

  that head shook exactly four times.

  So they sent us home. Somehow she bosses

  me around with that headshake, gets across

  every little message. And it’s weird,

  I used to be as quiet as a mule, but with her

  gone mute I feel it’s my duty to charm the air.

  But enough of me clearing your throat—

  I’ll shut up so you can tell about your travels,

  just let me roll her once more.

  Friends ask me how I’m holding up.

  That’s what they say: How you holding up?

  But what they mean to say is this:

  How’s tending a vegetable that don’t grow? Well,

  if there’s a god and he’s listening right now

  I’m nothin short of ashamed: this thing beat Jesus

  right out of me. But when you lived

  what I lived and seen what I seen

  happen to who it happened to, there just aint

  nothin in it. No order. No holiness.

  And don’t sit there eyeballing me like maybe

  the Lord’s breaking earth to sow seeds.

  Don’t tell me there’s a larger purpose.

  I won’t hear it. I won’t listen to another word.

  PRIDE

  After pulling a score from the dumpster

  behind Krogers I stroll through

  sliding doors with egg-caked hands.

  The greeter greets me as I pass. I scan

  the aisles like a surgeon studying the mint

  versions of organs she cuts out

  of men. The dented cans of black beans,

  undented, would have cost me

  ten bucks. The unexpired cartons of cream:

  another twenty. I smile at the math.

  For the dark roast alone I’d have forked over

  forty-seven. For eight uncracked eggs

  out of a dozen: about a buck-eleven.

  Might as well be money I found.

  Might as well be money I made.

  By the time I get to the frozen foods

  I’m up two hundred. Markdown meats

  and I’m up three. In the bathroom

  I lock the door behind me and twist

  on the tap. As the yellow crust peels

  off my hands the mirror clouds over

  with steam. I finger the total

  where my face used to be.

  NEWS

  Whoever you are, they take care of you.

  Dean leans over and labors the crank-window,

  asking where you need to go. Lillian shows

  how to clean and reload. Tucker. The Lees.

  Savannah shrunk by cancer. Lyle by diet,

  ordering you what he can’t eat. Hands that pass

  the double cheese and hands that steer the wheel,

  a foot floored toward Tennessee, our necks keeping

  Hendrix’s beat. Each morning another warning

  about the darkness out there. Triple murder,

  no suspects. Alien abductions in the Palouse.

  A family gone missing. A family found,

  their organs removed. Each day, against all this

  breaking news, another stranger saving you.

  ST. MARY’S MEMORIAL

  He wakes to the sound of the television talking,

  the blinds drawn, a room that doesn’t smell

  like his. In the infomercial glow he can see

  he’s in a hospital gown and his fingers

  are missing. He thinks he can feel his thumbs

  but when he paws at the gauze he finds

  purple stumps. Swollen. Stitched. Last night

  when the cops brought him in from the windchill

  he was too far gone to know his name

  or if he had insurance. Now on the screen

  a beautiful woman is selling him

  a vacuum. A blender. A new kind

  of shampoo. Even before she lets him eat

  the orderly begins teaching him how to use

  what’s left over. What he can hold by pinching

  a palm, what he’ll have to use his mouth for.

  It gets easier, she says, peeling the lid

  off a tub of yogurt. The first day is always

  the toughest. The man looks down at the blue

  slippers on his feet. Stares at the screen

  as the woman slices the prices in half. Catches

  the orderly’s young, educated eyes as she lifts

  a plastic spoon for him to bite. Darling,

  he says, this aint the first day of anything.

  COUSIN JOSH ON LIGHTHOUSE MISSION

  Fargo, North Dakota

  Don’t tell none of the fellas in here, but I’m not

  really homeless. I’m just waitin for some shit

  to blow over. And truth be told, this aint a bad

  little shelter, but I wouldn’t even pretend to sleep

  if I hadn’t landed myself a top bunk. I got my shit

  stuffed up in the rafters and my shoes

  tied up there too. Some a these guys go lookin

  for their size in the night, or at least for somethin

  they can trade with. It’s anything for a fix

  with these crackheads. I don’t even take off my kicks

  in the shower. Thought I saw some bad bathrooms

  in the big house, but at least I made it outta there

  without some kinda mushroom growin

  on my foot. I did two years on a drug thing,

  I don’t mind tellin you. Two years up at county

  and four years down at the university:

  where you think I got my education?

  I wouldn’t say it too loud among this kinda crowd,

  but I’m a republican. Any man with half a head

  is a liberal when he’s young and a conservative

  when he’s grown. That’s a fact. That’s a nature thing.

  Speakin of nature, I don’t fuck with the food in here.

  A couple months back my buddy Critter

  found a finger in his pudding cup. A human finger,

  and I aint bullshittin. Had a fingernail and everything.

  Clipped off below the knuckle. A little tiny one.

  Looked like a lady’s finger, but it coulda been a child’s

  just as easy. Before the cops came and took it away,

  Critter was fingerprintin dollar bills with the dead

  finger, usin the butterscotch like it was ink.

  He printed about ten bills, then turned around

  and started sellin em for two bucks a pop.

  And the craziest thing is, folks was buyin em!

  Motherfucker was doublin his luck on each buck,

  and I wasn’t the only fool to notice. Pretty soon

  all the crackheads was takin a extra pudding cup

  and tryin to find another finger. Some of these maniacs

  is still lookin to this day. Anything for a fix,

  like I told you. Anyways, I got mine up in the rafters

  if you wanna buy it.

  SOFT HUNTING

  Crouching behind a Cosco container

  we rattled into Fargo in the dark,

  the searchlights raking your face,

  warping your nose, the air tubes

  hissing in our ears as we whispered

  to each other, as yo
u drew the plans

  with your finger on my knee.

  Or was it me who drew the plans

  on your knee? Was it Fargo or Mandan?

  Cosco or Hanjin? How would you

  describe the train’s soft hunting

  back and forth on the tracks,

  the stutter-stops of all five engines,

  the painful groan of a local

  lurching forward through the yard?

  Could you bring to life the welder

  suddenly above us, working

  on the girders of a bridge as we passed

  underneath? Could you make a stranger

  feel the hot sparks cascading—

  the way they hovered in the air

  like snow, the way they glowed

  as we caught them in our oil-

  stained hands, the way I brushed them

  from your tangled hair. It doesn’t matter.

  Every version of this story is equally

  useless. Because no matter how far

  we try to pull away from each other,

  no matter how far we ride these coal-

  dusted rails over our own Dakotas,

  it’s always the same old story

  with us, the burden of having a brother

  coming down on us both like fire.

  THE MARK

  Some say fire, some say language.

  Some say God made us in his image

  on the sixth day. Some say tools,

  some religion. Some say whenever

  we first dug a hole, marked

  a grave—maybe the Neanderthal

  family found in northern Spain:

  skulls, ribs, jaws, a bowlful of teeth,

  a nearly complete spine, a hand,

  every digit intact, arranged

  below flowstone almost as in life.

  Some say art, some crude representation.

  Some say cooked caribou

  catalyzed the boom in our brains.

  Mother, father, child, infant.

  Harris lines in the femurs told

  how meager their meals were.

  Their collarbones gnawed on, sawed

  through, hacked at with flint tools,

  ribcages crushed with something blunt

  to get at the liver and marrow:

  if they were buried they were buried

  by their murderers. Some say up-

  right gaits, opposable thumbs,

  three-pound brains. Their skulls

  cloven with engraved lithic blades.

  The written word. Ritual.

  Organs still warm in the middle.

  Empathy. A sense of shame. Some say

  we’re still on the way to human.

  NORTHERN CORN

  Traveling alone through Minnesota

  as the corn comes in. Steel silos filling

  to the brim. Black trees leaning

  off the south sides of hills as cold light

  falls slantwise against the gristmills.

  You have allowed another year to pass.

  You have learned very little.

  But that little is what you’re throwing

  in the furnace. That little is stoking the dust-

  coals of last year and burning something.

  Burning blue. The ninety-year-old father

  is bringing his crop in. He climbs

  off the combine, checks the engine,

  moves an oak branch. He pours

  rye whiskey from a thermos and sips

  the lidless excess of his private noon.

  The size of his hands. The size of one finger.

  The flathead prairie of his calloused

  thumb pad. He lies awake in the middle

  of the night and whispers something

  and suddenly loves his son again.

  The way excess falls through him.

  The way oil runs down the Mississippi River

  and remains on the surface and burns.

  The father no longer breathing.

  The respirator breathing. The father lying

  in a hospital bed in a nightgown.

  The plastic tubes and machinery.

  The whole hospital breathing.

  The janitor waxing the vinyl floors

  at midnight while life is trying hard

  to leave. You must go to your father

  while he is still your father.

  You must hold him. You must kiss him.

  You must listen. You must see the son

  in the father and wonder. You must admit

  that you wonder. Stand above him

  and wonder. Drop his swelled-up hand.

  Whisper something. Now unplug the machine.

  CUTTING FOR SIGN

  Flat on my back in the sagebrush

  as cops cut for sign by the tracks,

  snowflakes falling loose and drawled

  through their shaky tubes of light.

  Wyoming. A fluke September storm.

  I’ve been lying still for so long

  snow fills the creases in my coat,

  makes moguls on my buttons, drifts

  on my brow. Less and less of me

  to find. When the flashlights move

  down the mainline the flakes turn

  to flecks of darkness, visible

  against the low, cloud-muffled sky.

  My shoes capped with cones

  of powder, my outline broken

  by crisscrossing sticks. Less and less.

  BUTTE

  My brother bolt-cuts a hole through the mesh

  over the Family Dollar dumpster in Butte.

  I lower myself through. Dull light mumbles

  from the car-emptied lot, slumping

  on day-old donuts, moldy seed bread,

  a bulk bag of oats the rats have chewed through.

  I hand up the bread. I hand up the donuts.

  I hand up the tub of yogurt someone

  bought, opened, tasted, and returned.

  I go shoulder-deep through the yolk-crusted bags,

  reaching—maybe fruit, maybe meat.

  After a while you can name what you feel.

  Groping wet shapes with the tips of your fingers.

  Lifting them up to your brother.

  COUSIN JOSH ON HIS LIVER

  Fargo, North Dakota

  Ma’s always on me about my diet. Always on me

  about the cancer and the stomach acid

  and the diabetes. So what if my liver gave out?

  So what if the doctor says not even a sip?

  If a grown man wants to sit back and crack

  a cold one that’s his own Han Solo. But Ma can’t

  leave it alone. Can’t stop prayin for me.

  Says she wants to see her one and only son

  in heaven. And I keep tellin her: Ma, you can see me

  right now! Feast your eyes! It aint my fault I aint

  Christian. I’d be the first man up the believin pole

  if there was somethin to believe in.

  She sets mantraps every Sunday, but

  the truth is, she couldn’t drag my ass to church

  if I was a sack and she was a dragger.

  If the Lord wants me he can come and get me.

  I aint hidin. I aint got no sheet over me. Sure, I’ll shit

  and piss for a few more years, but it’s no big secret

  I’m a dead man. All Ma wants to wonder is if

  I’ll be up there dancin when she gets there.

  And the thing that knocks my cock around

  is how she never doubts her own goddamn grace,

  never doubts she’ll slide through them pearly gates.

  So I’m always teasin her, always askin:

  Are the animals up there, Ma? Are the plants?

  Are the Neanderthals? I bet the whole planet’s

  up there. I bet when you get there you don’t even

  know you’re there, cept for all the Neanderthals />
  walkin around. I bet it’s like goin home

  to your folks’s place years after you moved out—

  everything’s the same, and everybody’s there,

  and you’re there, and there’s that moment

  when you first walk in and smell what the house

  smells like. You know what I’m talkin about.

  Straightaway you know that smell. You know it

  better than you know your own goddamn face.

  And you know you aint never smelled it

  no place else. Not in all these years. Not whiff one.

  And the smell rushes at you and fills you up.

  And the only thought you can think is how in the dry dive

  did I survive all this time without it?

  AFFORDING THE FUNERAL

  for Josh

  Your folks were about to downsize anyway.

  The Ford. The riding lawnmower. Letting go

  of the furniture was harder. The hope chest

  had sailed from Norway with Great-Grandpa Morris

  in 1904, but the age and the make made it

  liquidable. The trampoline. The jewelry.

  There was no need to pay a pastor outside the family.

  Uncle Dan did a fine job. Told the story

  about the mullet to highlight your stubbornness,

  which everyone said afterwards they loved.

  The china covered most of the casket. The speedboat

  got the headstone. And someone from Odegard

  Funeral Home went to Aunt Mary’s church,

  so they gave us permission to come a day early

  and dig the hole. We were told we had to reach

  the standard depth, but they were willing

  to turn a blind eye while we got there.

  SHOALWATER

  Waves grind the shoreline and darken into pools.

  Crabs shuffle sideways, lost in the washed-up eelgrass.

  Seagulls spit littleneck clams to the rocks

  and don’t even eat the shattered bodies.

  They fly as high as the clouds and wrap talons

  in the wind. But this kind of love isn’t rare.

  When I dream about my brother he disappears

  if I look. He wears a bird-bone bracelet,

  but I only know this by feel. Even his hair

  is something I imagine. His nose occurs solely

  as contours. I walk down the beach

  and throw stones at the oncoming waves.

  This is the best we can do. We leak every time