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Tennessee

Tennessee It was easy to say young. It was easy to say summer. Summer. Fruit bled from trees. I loved a married man, and in the months after, it was easy to say I wanted trust. I wanted wisdom. I wanted a father. Doctors said it, perched on chairs; friends, leaning over coffee. But what I wanted was dead.What I wanted crawled into a Tennessee cave to die— the country singer, clad in black, hopped up on amphetamines—but did not die, not then. The rocks were a balm, a choir of elbows. Jesus smiled from the water-cupped pit. And when he returned, leaves clung to him, chest and limb. He sweated out the drugs, married, lived to be seventy, sang holy, holy. It is not the going under.That we managed, ascending the stairs. Each push broke through my body until he was past my body, until he was piercing the quilt, the frame, the rug, the floor, the plaster-stitched ceiling with perfect stars, a path like the newspaper picture -10- -11of the burned house: upstairs, a fire had cut through blankets and bed, clear to the first story in the sleeping shape of the child who had died. He could give me death, enough skin to drown.What he could not give, what I wanted: it was to rise up. ...