Country Music: Selected Early Poems

Tattoos

Tattoos 1. Necklace of flame, little dropped hearts, Camellias: I crunch you under my foot. And here comes the wind again, bad breath Of thirty-odd years, and catching up. Still, I crunch you under my foot. Your white stalks sequester me, Their roots a remembered solitude. Their mouths of snow keep forming my name. Programmedincendiaries, Fused flesh, so light your flowering, So light the light that fires you —Petals of horn, scales of blood—, Where would you have me return? What songs would I sing, And the hymns . . . What garden of wax statues . . . 1973 56 2. The pin oak has found new meat, The linkworm a bone to pick. Lolling its head, slicking its blue tongue, The nightflower blooms on its one stem; The crabgrass hones down its knives: Between us again there is nothing. And since The darkness is only light That has not yet reached us, You slip it on like a glove. Duck soup, you say. This is duck soup. And so it is. Along the far bank Of Blood Creek, I watch you turn In that light, and turn, and turn, Feeling it change on your changing hands, Feeling it take. Feeling it. 57 1972 3. Body fat as my forearm, blunt-arrowed head And motionless, eyes Sequin and hammer and nail In the torchlight, he hangs there, Color of dead leaves, color of dust, Dumbbell and hourglass—copperhead. Color of bread dough, color of pain, the hand That takes it, that handles it —The snake now limp as a cat— Is halfway to heaven, and in time. Then Yellow Shirt, twitching and dancing, Gathers it home, handclap and heartstring, His habit in ecstasy. Current and godhead, hot coil, Grains through the hourglass glint and spring. 1951 58 4. Silt fingers, silt stump and bone. And twice now, in the drugged sky, White moons, black moons. And twice now, in the gardens, The great seed of affection. Liplap of Zuan's canal, blear Footfalls of Tintoretto; the rest Is brilliance: Turner at 3 a.m.; moth lamps Along the casements. O blue Feathers, this clear cathedral . . . And now these stanchions of joy, Radiant underpinning: Old scaffolding, old arrangements, All fall in a rain of light. I have seen what I have seen. 1968 59 5. Hungering acolyte, pale body, The sunlight—through St Paul of the 12 Sorrows— Falls like Damascus on me: I feel the gold hair of Paradise rise through my skin Needle and thread, needle and thread; I feel the worm in the rose root. I hear the river of heaven Fall from the air, I hear it enter the wafer And sink me, the whirlpool stars Spinning me down, and down. O . . . Now I am something else, smooth, Unrooted, with no veins and no hair,washed In the waters of nothingness; Anticoronal, released . . . And then I am risen, the cup, new sun, at my lips. 1946 60 6. Skyhooked above the floor, sucked And mummied by salt towels, my left arm Hangs in the darkness, bloodwood, black gauze, The slow circle of poison Coming and going through the same hole . . . Sprinkle of rain through the pine needles, Shoosh pump shoosh pump of the heart; Bad blood, bad blood . . . Chalk skin like a light, Eyes thin dimes, whose face Comes and goes at the window? Whose face . . . For I would join it, And climb through the nine-and-a-half footholds of fever Into the high air, and shed these clothes and renounce, Burned over, repurified. 1941 61 7. This one's not like the other, pale, gingerly— Like nothing, in fact, to rise, as he does, In three days, his blood clotted, His deathsheet a feather across his chest, His eyes twin lenses, and ready to unroll. Arm and a leg, nail hole and knucklebone, He stands up. In his right hand, The flagstaff of victory; In his left, the folds of what altered him. And the hills spell V, and the trees V ... Nameless, invisible, what spins out From this wall comes breath by breath, And pulls the vine, and the ringing tide, The scorched syllable from the moon's mouth. And what pulls them pulls me. 1963 62 8. A tongue hangs in the dawn wind, a wind That trails the tongue's voice like a banner, star And whitewash, the voice Sailing across the...