Gust: Poems

Mystery

50 Mystery 1 My grandma painted pictures of her face on junkyard treasures—lightbulbs, globes, ball bearings. My favorite was a frowning yellow vase with messy eyes like boot-squashed blueberries. Two years after she died, we bought a house along a fault line. I remember fearing the vast black fields would crack as bright as lightning, hell’s glow exposed. Though far from marvelous, our first tremor caused Grandma’s vase to dance off my dresser and break across the floor. I sat up half the night, my smooth, small hands roughened with glue, puzzling shards back together. The years have hidden that pale vase. I fear it may be lost, lost the crevices like fault lines on the face, mapping her spirit. By now I can’t be sure: did she paint those, or were they cracks I mended carefully? There is no one to ask. No one knows. Everything that shatters is a mystery. 2 Sam Doyle, an artist of the Gullah Islands, painted in the colors of coastal moons and with a virtuosic violence— high art in Voudou vision, blues cartoons. I motored into Sam Doyle country once and found a gallery with two or three 51 of those wild works he used to trade for whiskey. A docent told me Doyle believed the haints he often painted fled their sweetgrass jungle when a car first disturbed the island night. Most of his art would leave the coast, as well. Picking strawberry guava, a man outside the gallery said he remembered Doyle. He called him Uncle Sam and I thought, Yes, but one we never knew. Breathing the smell of a salt wind rattling the wild palmettos, I wondered where a car-shy haint might flee, now that birds nest in Walmarts’ R’s and A’s. Everything that scatters is a mystery. 3 A scientist says to me, “I thrive on knowing.” For twenty years he’s researched one scant slice of brain. I get it. Granddaddy’s been hoeing one garden plot for even longer. It’s nice to know a passage of the world by heart. From om to amen, sacred books agree, the world is words. One myth says destiny is cosmic mail, epistolary art. Science, then, is grammar. And power to it, that noble, necessary enterprise! Praise be for ophthalmology and yet it can’t tell all that’s in a lover’s eyes. The world poem, if parsed, will not reveal its meanings one and all and settle matters. What we know, we never know in full, for all around our best interpreters, vases are dancing, spirits flying free. Everything that shatters, everything that scatters, everything that matters is a mystery. ...