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Jeff Daniel Marion Codas “What you see is what you get.” Such codas we learned from exotic sources, say the carnival barker lining his olive-skinned girls on stage outside the tent, their little hoochie-koochie twists and bumps luring us in to the hope of some imagined Casbah. “Just a hint, boys, of what you’ll see inside.” Room led to room like every mystery, until our pockets emptied of loose change, and we still had not seen it all. So it was with my father’s junkhouse, so much to see and so little time to take it all in: rows of jars loaded with rubber washers, gaskets, nuts and bolts, brass wood screws, steel ball bearings so shiny I could feel the silky roundness of them turning between my fingers, a few slipped to school for trade as we scrawled with shoetip the ovals and rings in the dust of marble season. How did he know what had been moved and placed back so carefully, a PT boat piston cut in half and fashioned into an ashtray (his relic from the war years of working for Alcoa in Detroit), only two ball bearings taken from the jar and clacking in my pocket? At ten I believed it was the immaculate order in the mind of God, His eye on each and every sparrow. “Son, 294 Jeff Daniel Marion you don’t need to be messing with the things in my house.” And so I learned not to tamper, to look but not to touch. Until I turned fourteen and he handed me his .22 automatic rifle: at the dump site I watched him drop rats on the run, never more than a single shot. He lined five beer bottles against the red clay bank. “First you shoot the lip off, then the neck, and last you take the easy gut shot.” Long ago I had heard the legend around town: “Boy, your old man could shoot the hairs off a chigger’s ass.” Our first trip into the field, “See that rabbit hiding over behind the cedar— take him when I flush him out.” I stared and stared and finally saw the tip of one ear peeking through the cedar. Gut shot, he flopped down the bank. My father turned his back to me, lifted the rabbit by its hind legs, and stilled its spasms with one quick blow to the head. He thought I did not see and through all the years we never spoke of it. But today, standing in his junkhouse ten years past his dying, I lift from memory that old tattered scrap “what you see is what you get,” look at all these treasures he laid up, and bow to every moment of his mercy. ———— Reprinted with permission of Wind Publishing. Published in Father (2009). * * * Jeff Daniel Marion 295 Song for Wood’s Barbeque Shack in McKenzie, Tennessee Here in mid-winter let us begin to lift our voices in the pine woods: O sing praise to the pig who in the season of first frost gave his tender hams and succulent shoulders to our appetite: praise to the hickory embers for the sweetest smoke a man is ever to smell its incense a savor of time bone deep: praise for Colonel Wood and all his workers in the dark hours who keep watch in this turning of the flesh to the delight of our taste: praise to the sauce—vinegar, pepper, and tomato— sprinkled for the tang of second fire: praise we now say for mudwallow, hog grunt, and pig squeal, snorkle snout ringing bubbles of swill in the trough, each slurp a sloppy vowel of hunger, jowl and hock, fatback and sowbelly, root dirt and pure piggishness of sow, boar, and barrow. ———— Reprinted with permission of Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in Ebbing and Flowing Springs (2009). * * * 296 Jeff Daniel Marion The Dying Art “You’re in the zone of particularity,” the radiologist said to the intern, staring at the moon-disk screen, socket and bone of my hip his lunar landscape. The needle eased into the narrow groove, left its message to heal, rise from the table and walk. Restored and reprieved but with no physician’s skill, I’ll take up the fountain pen to probe that zone of particularity, the address of both letters and poetry. Email won’t suffice—I want that handwritten page, ink as blue as this morning’s April sky, cursive letters sweeping across...

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