by Mary Karr
He spat in the punchbowl and smelled like a foot.
His forehead was a ledge
he leered beneath. When I was sent to tutor him
in geometry, so he might leave
(at last) ninth grade, he sat running pencil lead
beneath his nails.
If radiance shone from those mudhole eyes,
I missed it. Thanks, David
for your fine slang. You called my postulates
post holes; your mom endured
ferocious of the liver. Plus you ignored—
when I saw you wave at lunch—
my flinch. Maybe by now you’re ectoplasm,
or the zillionth winner of the Texas
death penalty sweepstakes. Or you occupy
a locked room with a small
round window held fast by rivets, through which
you are watched. But I hope
some organism drew your care—orchid
or cockroach even, some inmate
in a wheelchair whose steak you had to cut
since he lacked hands.
In this way, the unbudgeable stone
that plugged the tomb hole
in your chest could roll back, and in your sad
slit eyes could blaze
that star adored by its maker.
THIS LESSON YOU’VE GOT
to learn is the someday you’ll someday
stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
shed, ready to poke your bovine head
in the yoke they’ve shaped.
Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
breathes, pays tax, plants dead
and hurts galore. There’s grief enough
for each. My mother
learned by moving man to man,
outlived them all. The parched earth’s
bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
the instants I trod it.
Other than myself, of course.
I’ve made a study of bearing
and forbearance. Everyone does,
it turns out, and note
those faces passing by: Not one’s a god.
THE CHOICE
Once in northern England, I got a few pub drunks
to drive to Wordsworth’s house, local thugs
whose underheated VW (orange) took me
fishtailing down icy hills,
through hedgerows in an unlit labyrinth
reminiscent of the library stacks I wandered around
zombie-like each day, not composing
verses but waiting in scarlet lipstick
for the bars to open. I’d left my homeland
fleeing a man I’d faked first caring, then
not caring about, and in months of Euclidean solitude
I’d writ no cogent phrase. The notebook in my knapsack
was a talisman I carried into train stations so as not
to look like a bimbo. But bimbo
I was, and open, the bound pages were only white wings
to nap on. Near dawn, our caravan came
to a sleet-glazed window—a child’s stumpy desk
with the poet’s initials penknifed on top.
It was my first stab of reverence,
when that hunger to emblazon
some surface with oneself became barbarous
wonder at someone else. W.W.—
jagged as inverted Alps, unscalable
as a cathedral’s gold-leaf dome.
After that, grad school was a must.
There I posed as supplicant till enough
magnificence had been poured
down my throat that I could whiff
the difference between it and the stench
I spilled. When I told the resident genius
that given the choice between writing and being
happy, I’d pick the latter, she touched my folio
with her pencil like a bad fairy’s wand,
saying: Don’t worry, you don’t have that choice.
And in a blink of my un-mascara’ed eye
the intricate world bloomed into being—impossible
to transcribe on the small bare page.
(for Brooks Haxton)
A MAJOR
I’ve come to see a dread-locked man
play Mozart like a demon (someone said) with angels
harrowing his back, or like a seraph
sought by succubi.
The black piano waits wide-legged, in boxer’s pose.
It’s a sarcophagus that stores
whole flocks of birds, banks of cirrus clouds,
Egyptian forest groves,
and a thousand metaphysical motes
to sting a watcher’s eyes like sleet.
A corps in funeral dress lines up in rows,
but the piano holds the most tonight.
We gather on its rim and hunger towards it,
till the stage man props its jaw wide.
Then out strides this lion-headed man,
whom everyone can see the weather in. Then
the winds inhale, and the bows tilt at even angles
like the tiny masts of lifted sails.
Right away, the piano’s notes unknot
some inner ropes in me, hoist some mainsheet,
loose in us some breeze, and with a broad wave
of the maestro’s wand, we’re off,
the notes skittering us along
like surf. The keys are black and bone and pose
a hurried order. When his lion’s head
drops back, his face becomes a soft-edged mask
lifted in defiance of the night we came here
stalled in. See, my face is wet
I never haven’t breathed so long. I’ve seen
a death with order, meant but no way mean.
He’s sprung our sternums wide
and freed us from our numbered seats.
We levitate as one and try to match
the thunder in his chest
with all our hands.
(for Awadagin Pratt)
WAITING FOR GOD: SELF-PORTRAIT AS SKELETON
Need is a death’s head—SIMONE WEIL
The winter Mother’s ashes came in a Ziploc bag,
all skin was scorched from me, and my skull
was a hard helmet I wore to pray with my middle finger bone aimed at the light fixture—Come
out,
You fuck, I’d say, then wait for God to finish me
where I knelt; or for my dead mother to assemble in clouds
of the Aquanet hairspray she’d used abundantly
in her bleach blond Flashdance phase at sixty when she’d phone
all slurry and sequined with disco playing to weep
so I’d send cash, and once she splurged on a bloated sofa
and matching Lazy-Boy recliner where her fat love could sprawl
with gold chains on his hairy chest while she painted the mural
of hippos to honor their nude abundances. Was it God
who dragged her from the kitchen floor
where she’d puked and the guy had pissed himself
to detox, to a rickety chair where she eventually sat upright
with eyes clear as seawater? Yes, I said
to myself one day, kneeling, I believe
that’s right. Then from the hard knot at my skull’s base
I felt warm oil as from a bath bead broken open
somehow flow upward to cover my skull, and my hair
came streaming down again,
and the soft clay crawled back to form my face.
(for Kent Scott)
AT THE SOUND OF THE GUNSHOT, LEAVE A MESSAGE
That’s what my friend spoke
into his grim machine the winter he first went mad
as we both did in our thirties with still
no hope of revenue, gravely inking
our poems on pages held fast by gyres
the color of lead.
Godless, our minds
did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp
until we sank. His eyes were burn holes
in a swollen face. His breath was a venom
he drank deep of. He called his own tongue
a scar, this poet
who can crowbar open
the most sealed heart, make ash flower,
and the cocked shotgun’s double-zero mouths
(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain
and not a few locked doors) never touched
my friend’s throat. Praise
Him, whose earth is green.
(for Franz Wright)
ELEGY FOR A RAIN SALESMAN
Dear friend, I heard tonight by phone
of that ghost bubble in your brain.
It was not the pearl of balance one fits
between lines in a carpenter’s level
to make something plumb, but a blip
in a membrane that burst so now
your fine brain is dead—
that city of mist that nests in your skull
will never again flicker with light.
Flying the red-eye home, I talked to your mom tonight
by air phone. Through static
her voice stayed calm, wondering when
to unhook the hospital’s bellows.
She thought a trip
to the beauty shop would help, and John,
how you’d have cackled at that.
That winter when I was broke
and camped on your sofa for months,
your dusky laugh kept me alive.
Each night in a menthol fog we drank
till last call.
Once staggering home, we stopped
to crane up between buildings, lines of windows
rising away in rows. We listed in wonder,
leaning together like cartoon drunks. There was
a rectangle of sparkled sky you pointed out—
beauty’s tattered flag—we pledged allegiance to—
mittens over our heaving chests,
cold to break your teeth on,
a jillion stars foretelling none of this. Your mom said
your last sight on earth was your own face
in the shaving glass—in that hermit’s flat on Colfax Ave.
where I watched you tape to the bathroom wall
the first New Yorker rejection of hundreds.
So that monocled asshole
on the letterhead must have recurred
like wallpaper four hundred times
behind your moon face rising. Freeze
that frame. Let me hold awhile
with imagined hands that face,
as you might have briefly held that day
the worn oval of soap,
idly, with no thought of its vanishing.
Let me watch you shape in your palm
a frail Everest of shaving foam,
then smear yourself a snowman’s face
with coal eyes staring out. The night
that drew our drunk salute has now
bled into that skull,
glazed its porcelain with spider cracks
like a Grecian urn. Our time’s
run out, no epitaph on which to land safe
appears in my oval porthole. The prairie slides beneath
me white as any page. And rain has hardened
into ticking sleet. Sleep, friend, as I cannot, reading
the lines you left,
streaking behind you like a meteor trail:
…. I wanted to be a rain salesman,
carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,
selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour,
but there are no openings in the rain department,
and so they left me dying behind this desk—adding bleeps,
subtracting chunks—and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms,
