Spring Morning 
It's a spring morning in the 1940's when Ozella
and my mother misunderstand each
other. The exterminator man in his green
Orkin uniform coming up the walk, mother calls
from the porch back to the kitchen.
Do we have any bugs?
No'm, we used all those we had yesterday. She'd
thought mother'd said bulbs, light
bulbs, mother so elongated
her buuuuuhhhhs, and barely put final consonants on
at all. Now here's the bug man with
his metal spray gun lying
down on the brick walk to laugh. We are so ready
to laugh in the 1940's, we get down
on our sides to enjoy it.
Whittling
John Seawright's great uncle Griff Verner
spent much of his last days whittling neck-yokes
for his chickens to wear so
they couldn't get through the wide slat divisions of
his yard fence. There are other possible
solutions to this problem, but eggs have
yolks, and Griff Verner's chickens had yokes, and he
himself had that joke-job in a bemused
neighborhood that watched every move.
Somewhere there's a crate of Griff's chicken yokes, I hope,
as there's a wild shoebox of vision-songs
stashed by a poet whose name we don't know yet,
nor the beauty and depth of his soulmaking, hers. Griff's
white pine, Rembrantian fowl-collars may
have also served as handles to wring their
necks with when Sunday demanded. John's grandmother's
Methodist house had only two books in it, the Holy
Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs. When it
rained,
there wasn't much to do indoors, and on Sundays nothing, no
games, no deck of cards, no dominoes. Of course, no
television. I grew up in a house with no
television in the 1940's and on into the mid-50's. We were
in education. Sometimes at night there would
be five different people in four different
rooms reading five different books. John says once
his mother caught Sam and him playing cards
on the floor. She snatched up the deck and
said,
"Well, you can play cards in jail." There's always chores to
do in the methodical world, no spare time to waste or
kill. Throw those idle gypsy two-faces
in the trash. Let them find other haphazard palms to occupy.
John's father could carry on a side conversation with
him while typing a sermon. John remembers how
as a
child he would sit and talk with his dad and watch him do
those two word things simul-manu-larynxactly
together in the after-dinner Friday night
office.
Griff Verner's whittling comes when you're not spry
enough to chase chickens but take some interest
in the public's consternation with oddness.
Silo, Spring Violets
By the violets in the watercress
new grass under the slender ash
trees by the rooted-river spidery
bankedge, I fold in with edible lavender
butterflies, each next each in
a wandering myth of body, and
crows. I do not know who I am,
or ever will, who invite friends
to see a silo of memory
whose house is an empty plot between
an uncovered well and this other
cylinder of poured concrete. We
go clumped together as a kind of a way
for a while, then take our single stems
aloof. Listening to music
in the dark I feel a great sphere of violets
and water and grasses riding in the night between
us and the moon. It cannot be
looked at directly; it's more elusive even than
our fluttering stories that leave a
silky damp in the air.
Abscission Leaf, Looking into Water
A night-sleeping rain, become now these
puddle-windows where we watch
the others' eyes in a wet field:
look how we are not dead and buried!
The bread-push underfoot: loved ones
lying in a spherical bed so wide and round
we stretch your left sole to my right to
(wicker worsa) walk as each the other's path:
waking and dream in a kiss-touch
continuum: breath-faces moving at the mirror-lips
bahbah bahbahbah, as when I did observe
under the glass skin: turtle moving moss
thread, a frog's one-eye wink, before school or any
fear of the talking-knot tightening
in my stuck throat, rather its opposite
release, what scientists call the abscission layer
circling the stem where it lets go and
begins fly-fall. The gingko
has an abscission leaf which when it goes, the rest
will not be long. Her yellow
slip slips as we turn to see
and feel the abscission words loosen. Night
ensuing night, their resinous balsam,
carry my slow-spilled dose,
and a long river-silence flows in the juice. A red
blackspotted tupelo leaf and a
yellow fivepointed sweetgum rise off
the silt floor turning their tips to touch
the surface from the other side
and sail. I am lying asleep in a
nightriver room strobed with boatlight sidling
the curve, its engine throb below
the cliff boiling the churn and mix. |
