Freedom Hill: A Poem

Freedom Hill

freedom hill 5 i. May Day Can you hear me? Now? Now? Now? How I hate to be at the mercy of inferior machinery, a failing infrastructure, “the persistence of electrical nymphs in the air.” Oh, the wicked witch is locked to the landline, he’s in the parlor, twisting dials. I’m the one out on the deck dancing under global positioning satellites & the invisible stars. I tell you ever since I got down here they’re acting stranger & stranger. How can I express my anger when all they talk about is cantaloupes & the weather? How can I make it intelligible to them? Why add to the pain of an eighty-nine-year-old man who still keeps fourteen sheep, a flock of geese, chickens, guinea hens, a trio of cats, & a neurotic dog who travels on tranquilizers just because he happens to be my father? As the days pass we sit here in our striped lawn chairs watching the boats sail by, a lot of activity without much motion, a dream of old age, the regatta . . . Nursing my anger all night, I began my essay on the all-American fast food—Blood, then fell into a fitful sleep where I watched a child deliver a slideshow lecture on birth defects in Shakespeare to his parents—the crabbed shadow of the hunchback king under his gold crown—which led, in the dream, to a disquisition on tetrology, the genealogy of monsters, as in Frost’s “white-faced oxen” & that moment in Aristotle’s Physics where he notes: “Now mistakes occur even in operations of art: 6 the literate man makes an error in writing and the doctor pours out the wrong dose. Hence clearly mistakes are possible in operations of nature also . . . and monstrosities will be failures to the purposive effort.” No, with the Coveys you can’t turn over a stone without discovering a scandal—reason beguiled by madness, madness luring reason—the aging bachelor who traces the frailest thread right back to Mrs. Thrale & that line by Smart, in Bedlam: “For black blooms and it is PURPLE.” A genetic mapping of the family landscape that leaves me strangely related only to myself. Guilt, grief, remorse— all the false fathers. What, after all, is my inheritance? I grew up with chickens, ducks, geese, foul moods, get headaches from horses, garlic, pineapples, wild roses, the unaccountable smells of my childhood & I’m allergic to anything in the nightshade family. Just yesterday, standing in the bay window, facing the water, I could smell the lingering lavender scent of someone who’d been waiting so long the temporal structure had changed. Standing there I could feel an entirely different intersection of time. & my father? I don’t know what they mean by “crossing the bar,” but I can feel him wavering in & out, disappearing in shimmers of a silvery surface, a blind man wandering in the sand. Today he shows me a photo of me at six holding on for dear life in the ’38 hurricane & for a moment I have to seriously wonder whose side he’s on—mine or the hurricane’s? Looking at his photographs of sheep & the weather, blue shutters on a white barn, a diamondback coiled in shadows, I am witness to the outward & visible signs of the inward story that shaped me to utter it—my stale patrimony—a stunted fig tree & memories of a mother’s destroyed son. Between America & my immediate family, I’m paralyzed. I do a lot of sitting & staring at water or thinking about the latest fire sale at the Walt Whitman Mall. 7 That green-eyed slave-breaker, Snake Covey, must be turning over in his grave as my cousin marries an African queen with a Doc.Phil. from Oxford, & yesterday in the dwarf closet underneath the cellar stairs I discovered a box of negatives—nude photos of my mother. I took a commercial sleeping pill, which gave me some relief, & this morning thumbing through The American Heritage Dictionary stopped at the thirteenth letter, M—mafia, money—to trace the etymology of “macaroni” all the way back to “bless” & “bliss.” So when they say “Follow your bliss!” they mean “Have another helping of pasta!” Yes, we all rose on the same high tide, & will all be stranded by its withdrawal. All week I’ve been in the attic, poring over letters, photographs, account books for the month I was born...