Saturday 14 February 2015

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 24



Rules of Engagement



No snow now, only the memory of it,

yet April, insufficient still

except to tease each tree to leaf

then black the scent, infers a present

old enough and no older, the future stalled,

in a ditch-water sky the sun a hawk shape

faint above the cedars.
 

I came this far returning, from a cold spring

this close remembering why I came.
 

My flight to a lost world

claims back twenty years, a deep breath

held and held until I surfaced, just once,

back home, until then

a place where the dead and living stood unchanging,

all of one house in one memory,

the way memory remains

unchanged, faces and lives left standing

clear-edged in the mind

asking directions to a voice, its echoes.
 

Below the Mason-Dixon

everything and nothing changes.

The 19th century slinks by the Chevy showroom,

the lakeside condo views.
 

The maples are bigger now, vast canopies,

a tendril vastness of shade

dwarfing the old house— Mother in the yard

with the dead she counts on one hand,

on the other the living counted down

one by one to last addresses, cancer, each divorce,

a reconciliation no nearer

for the names recalled across time and these states.
 

These rebel towns are all the same:

the courthouse lawn, divot rednecks

arguing the war— the Civil War—

the shadow bronze of the Confederacy

a birdshit glaze all summer.

The past, its terrible beauty,

decorates each volunteer.
 

Where you been?

… Away.
 


The sun-break of oak along wide lanes,

in the stands pretty girls

baring midriff tans, at the field’s edge

the immaculate diamond’s early innings—

‘If I knew then…’, but what do I know

except that pretty girls are harvested,

boys now lean and quick move slower

every game, that the world itself slows

and no one can replace the day

within a field of bright days.
 

A white timber house, its shutters

closed against the heat, by the porch

the rambling reds of roses, reminds me

someone I knew lived here, in war time,

in a fragrance of pain, TV deaths less real somehow,

in a child’s throat

waves of jellied fire

burning through a million boxes

as we watched the Superfortress passing,

remote as a god.
 

Outside the town, old redoubts,

the old betrayal of armies from an older war

met in abstract time, each soldier’s soul

commended to a retrospective heaven

North or South—

I read about it in a book, the cemetery

stripped of railings for a prisoners’ stockade.
 

Salvation was sudden for civilians at their rest.

Beyond age, or childbirth, or the cholera

that set them deep in iron perimeters,

paradise came open-plan.


Maybe Jesus saves,

but in the rules of engagement

tomorrow is a land cured of memory,

where death means breathing easy

and time sanctifies and frees.
 

Here is yesterday, the secret slave,

the earth cleared grave by grave

along the path I took, the name

made for it but never shared—

in the mouth a kept coal,

its bitten heat.

Nowhere Man


I came across a Facebook posting recently. I should qualify that statement with the proviso that initially I needed to set up an organisational account for something, and a previously part-completed, unused personal profile seemed to auto-activate when the organisation account went live. At that point, a few people began to include me in their posts on my reluctantly personal account.

As such, I don't really exist on Facebook, or, if I do exist, it's only by proxy. I seem to be party to anniversaries, triumphant cake-baking displays, holiday photos of someone's toes in the sand, and pleadings to 'get right with God', and even if I remain steadfastly un-Like-able, I receive email reminders that 'someone you may know' would like to be friends.

All of which leads me to the recent posting mentioned above. Through a series of neural messaging algorithms, I found that someone whom I took to a high school prom in 1967 is now practicing law in California. I say now, but in fact she's been there decades. At seventeen, she was beautiful, with thick, blonde hair and a face of classicly beautiful proportions, flawless skin and ice-blue eyes.

Oddly, at the time, she wasn't one of the most popular girls. She had a few friends, was nice, studious, and was generally well-liked in an unobtrusive way. She was one on those people whom you see every day but take no real notice of, until one day, you happen to be looking their way and realise, "My God! She's gorgeous!"

When I asked her to the prom, she was completely unprepared for the question. I was a little bashful, calling over to her across the hallway, and then watching her face change as she realised she was being asked out, only a few days before Prom Night (I said I was bashful.). We both smiled, looked at the floor and wandered off with our friends.

I never had the wherewithall to date anyone properly - no job, no car - so prom night was my only venture into Beautiful Girl Land at the time. The next time I saw her was about three years later. I was in a bar on the Kentucky River, and she came in with an older guy, Jack, and they then went round the back of the place where he had a small rented room; he worked part-time at the bar and the room was an add-on. Through a previous arrangement, I had to stay nearby that night, and next morning the bar owner, to whom I was related through my sister's marriage, asked me to knock on Jack's door as he was late to start work.

When I knocked, she answered, "He'll be there in a minute." I don't know if she realised it was me, calling (I only said, "Jack..."), but I knew it was her, in bed with Jack, a divorced bartender living in a one-room flop behind a bar.

If I ever had occasion to meet her again, it might be because I happened to be in California, or it might be because I happened to be in California and needed a lawyer. Either way, the coin is in the air as to whether I'd remind her of our prom date way-back-when, or the morning I came knocking, a stranger beyond the door, hoping, perhaps, for a glimmer of recogntion, if she remembered me at all.