Collected Poems

DEVOTIONS

DEVOTIONS I longed to kill you once, when I was young, Because you laughed at me before my friends. And now the baffled prose Of a belated vengeance numbs my tongue. Come back, before the last wind bends Your body to the void beyond repose. Standing alone before your grave, I read The name, the season, every decent praise A chisel might devise — Deliberate scrawls to guard us from the dead. And yet I lift my strength, to raise Out of the mossy wallow your pig's eyes. The summons fell, but I could not come home To gloat above the hackling and the rasp Caught in your corded throat; And, many towns away, I heard your doom Tolling the hate beyond my grasp, Thieving the poisons of my angry thought. After so many years to lose the vision Of your last anguish! Furious at the cheat, After your burial I traveled here, to lay my weak derision Fresh as a garland at your feet. All day I have gathered curses, but they fail. I cannot even call to mind so clearly, As once I could, your confident thin voice Banishing me to nothing. Your hand crumbles, your sniffing nostrils barely Evoke the muscles of my loathing; And I too die, who came here to rejoice. Lost mocker of my childhood, how the moss Softens your hair, how deeply nibbling fangs Sink in the careless ground. SAINT JUDAS 81 Seasons of healing grasses weave across Your caving lips, and dull my strange Terror of failures. Shaken, I have found Nothing to mark you off in earth but stone. Walking here lonely and strange now, I must find A grave to prod my wrath Back to its just devotions. Miserable bone, Devouring jaw-hinge, glare gone blind, Come back, be damned of me, your aftermath. AT THE EXECUTED MURDERER'S GRAVE (forJ.L.D.) Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done? — FREUD i My name is James A. Wright, and I was born Twenty-five miles from this infected grave, In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father. He tried to teach me kindness. I return Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried, To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried, Had I not run away before my time. Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime, His skull rots empty here. Dying's the best Of all the arts men learn in a dead place. I walked here once. I made my loud display, Leaning for language on a dead man's voice. Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past. I add my easy grievance to the rest: 2 Doty, if I confess I do not love you, Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies. The nights electrocute my fugitive, 82 ...