Jacob Rakovan
Acknowledgments
Excerpts from this long-form poem have appeared in The Chicago Review
and Drunk in a Midnight Choir
“But when I had besought the tribes of the dead
with vows and prayers,
I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench,
and the dark blood flowed forth, and lo,
the spirits of the dead that be departed
gathered them from out of Erebus.“
Odyssey Book XI
Sing.
Outside the girdled ring of firelight,
the city's floodwalls,
the shakily chalked circle and
the thousand names of god.
Call the dark up to speak.
Hang the deer from the rusted swingset
Let the throat open.
Let blood be a song.
Be a river.
Let the black song splash against
the galvanized washtub.
Pour blood in the ditch
and sing a litany of names.
Put questions to the woods,
to the mine
to the ridges
to the grave
to the cold stars of our forgotten home.
Let gun and stolen hoard speak.
Let the door of the house hang open.
Let the earth disgorge what it holds
Let the catfish-barbed mouth of hell gape.
Sing.
Warnie Risener, hillbilly conman,
entrusted with keeping of store and post office
has engineered a plan
with Harland Roark.
They have stolen a safe filled with banknotes
the mortgage payments
the back taxes
the book of credit accounts
and the Sears & Roebuck checks.
Warnie has run, been caught, gone to prison.
The safe and money have not been recovered.
Warnie has done his time in silence,
grimly waiting within the walls for the jailhouse key.
Warnie has kept his mouth shut,
tight as a gunsafe lock
knowing how to keep a secret
and the metal doors swing wide.
Harland Roark, an educated man, a schoolteacher
with two daughters
and a criminal inclination
is thankful for this.
Warnie's Colt Police Positive .38 Special
has been used to put a bullet
in the workings of another man
to burst all his intricate plumbing
and let his death come leaking out
in a mine-dark stream
the unsung steaming song
that clots in the washtub
that the ditch-clay drinks.
Warnie has piled the safe
and money in his wagon.
He flees. It is winter
the mud is frozen,
the cows huddle in the cold
the houses are closed
and turned in on themselves
dreaming of spring.
Kentucky is frost and black wire
dead grass and river-ice and blood.
Warnie flees the pooled death of the man
the brittle light of the broken store
the certainty of more jail
a hangman's hempen pearls
and he goads the recalcitrant horse
onto the frozen road of the Ohio river.
(All rose soil
and wormfood below.)
Protest and lamentation of heavy white ice
catfish slow beneath it in cold mud
carved stones in muddy water
compressed snow on top, creaks and cracks
under the axles of the wagon.
Black birds in the bare trees.
The melancholy shore.
The safe, heavy as guilt and God
the hot gun in his hand
fleeing what he had wrought
branded with blood
and bloody doings
across a frozen river
came my family
into the land of my inheritance.
Nolda Roark, Warnie's woman
daughter of his accomplice
dowry of silence
with her bloody bride-price
rides in the wagon
a blanket pulled around her against the cold.
These progenitors bring forth all my line
carrying with them blood from Ireland, and Scotland
from Africa and the hills they flee.
Filled already with an unknowable past.
Marked with money and with murder
secret history of the hollers:
coal tattoo of blood, Abel bleeding in the store-light
midway between one riverbank and the next.
(Like leaves they gather on the shore
and wait for the boatman
the dead in throngs, to speak
with bloodstained mouths and hands
weary seed of Adam
gathered at the river.)
Nolda in her decline is frail
indecipherable, a gaunt white ghost
that haunts my childhood, and beyond her
through a glass, darkly, those dim angels
those giant's bones holding up the sky
Gog and Magog, progenitors and ghosts
river of blood, and music.
Like the hills themselves
there is no answer,
no locked garden gate
no sword of fire
no story of origin or emergence
for the people who chase coal into the earth
who sing songs of murder and the workhouse:
even now sing.
Though the mines and factories shutter
though the water fills with poison
though there in no there, there anymore.
Between one shore and another
death watching like black birds in the trees
Arsenic and chromium, mercury and benzene
the black eyes of river rats, cats in the unlight
Poison water, poison air, and all things burning.
When the Cherokee came to these hills
and valleys where the Scioto lived
the mounds sat ancient and ownerless
throbbing with empty power
a vacant church with kicked-in windows.
They told a story of a people whose skin burned in the day
who went forth to war by moonlight
and lived in the earth, pale as milk
and fearful of the sun.
Blue bottle fly maggots in the rotten soil.
We inheritors of the ancient earth
riddled with strange bones and stranger ruins
these nameless dead.
In Magoffin county
the blue Fugates bear a taint in their blood.
Blue in the skin when cold
the robin's egg I put my thumb through
India ink and a jailhouse needle
cornflower, chicory under a deer stand
the swallowers of silver.
Interbred until the other shines through
the star's blue light a cold blush, a coal tattoo, colloidal.
They are the children of the sky, and await
the road that will open their holler
their twining bloodline
to the larger world.
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men
that they were fair;
and they took them wives of all which they chose.
And the Lord said,
My spirit shall not always strive with man,
for that he also is flesh:
yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
There were giants in the earth in those days;
and also after that, when the sons of God
came in unto the daughters of men,
and they bare children to them,
the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Even as Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord
and the beginning of his kingdom was Babel
They will find skeletons of ancient men in the mounds
of giants who built the hills
whose bones are the hills
whose skull is the dome of the sky.
They will carve dead giants from soapstone
charge a nickel a peek.
These sideshow gods
these midway wonders
The wild men of the woods
cyclops skulls with mammoth tusks
mothmen and skunk apes
all my kin.
Men plow rocks with runes
from Midwestern fields or scratch them themselves.
Dry seasons bring from the river a stone
carved with an expressionless face, forgotten names
neither Kentucky nor Ohio can claim
this lost kingdom, this broken tower.
Every place, no place, our place.
The history of every family is a history of the world.
In Magoffin county, the Roarks
are counted among the numbers
of Melungeon, the “Portuguese” and “Spanish”
bloodline mixed and uncertain
claim Cherokee grandmothers
forget freedmen and slaves
recount olive skin
remark upon Keloid scarring and curling hair.
Black blood, slave blood
exile-blood of outlaw and outcaste
white trash, Scots-irish balladeers
mine and mountains
secrets the blood keeps.
Nolda Roark Risener
pale as a sheet on a line
white as a frozen river
white as river ice
when she is carried to her grave
her casket opened to the sky
her stitched mouth to sing
and the Old Regular Baptist Choir
(that coven of the Cherokee Princess's grandchildren)
without instrument sings
in liver-spotted hymnody
ten thousand years
shall we gather by the river?
That river
wider than the Mississippi
at Thebes
At Cairo
most-polluted river in the United States.
Infected vein on the heart of the country.
In the Seneca language ohi:yo', good river.
Woe in the language of the angels.
Claimed for France by LaSalle
and his Italian cartographer.
Conduit of the west,
swollen with barges,
swollen with black coal
swollen with Selenium, Benzene, Arsenic
swollen with Tetrachloroethylene,
swollen with Chlorodibromomethane
swollen with Hexachlorocyclopentadiene
swollen with Nitrosodimethylamine
swollen with 4-methylcyclohexane methanol
swollen with death
in all its polysyllabic and proprietary names.
Weariest river that winds to the sea
we have gathered on your banks
to await the judgment.
What do the dead sing?
They sing:
a litany of names.
They sing:
Down beside, where the waters flow
Down on the banks of the Ohio.
They sing:
We are rubber teeth in a vending machine
patched overalls, corncob pipe, felt hat
toothless criminals, illiterate murderers
incestuous cannibals, idiot children.
Sniffers of glue. Huffers of gasoline.
Moonbeam McSwine, Sadie Hawkins
moonshine stills and banjo melody.
We are wild men, our beards tangled with hawthorn
our ragged furs hanging in Morris-dance tatters
our antlered heads scraping the sky.
Digging ginseng on another man's land.
Deer Poachers. Horse Thieves.
Union troublemakers and Scab-Shooters.
Bootleggers and Meth-makers
Dope Farmers and Pill-Sellers
We are the gunshot on the next ridge,
the smoke of a stranger's fire.
We are that thing that squats in the dark
outside the fire's ring,
those who tear asunder,
those who glisten horribly,
the flesh inclothed
the evil questioners
the destroyers
the devourers
those born from the monstrous mother of the world.
Drinkers of strychnine.
Handlers of serpents.
Cannibals and killers
We are the dead, and the end of all things is in us.
There is no end to beginnings.
Nolda Roark crosses the frozen river, forever
expressionless stone without a state
young and not yet deaf
she brings forth
Norma, who will die of childbed fever
begetting Joyce
who begets Neva
bringing all my line into the world
that new shore she cannot see.
How many deaths
do we carry within us, even now?
What mercy of blindness have we been given?
What dim shape below the ice?
What chemical cloud in the river?
What slumbering lump of cancerous growth?
What urge for the bottle, or the needle
or the pills crushed on the dinnerplate?
What secret name does our angel know?
Warnie, with his gun and killer's hands
heads towards a future he imagines is free
imagines himself outside of jailhouse walls
his neck free of the rope
but He and Nolda are trapped in the moment
fish in the ice of time
dead and speaking
their smiles frozen light
silver on paper.
Their voices wax cylinders
scratched film waiting for a spark
to send them creaking
to motion again, these marionettes
Pontius and Judas
smiling and smiling
cheery as wax fruit.
In 1925, on Virginia Beach
after ices, a walk on the boardwalk
after Vernon Dalhart singing on a crackling Victrola.
Warnie and Nolda see the sleeping prophet
The dreamer of Atlantis and Egypt
The Miracle Man, Edgar Cayce
Reader of past lives, faith healer and mystic.
He, oracular, somnabulant, in a stentorian voice
tells Warnie that his heart is bad.
That his blood is slow, is cold ( is black)(is bile)
Warnie is a dead man
made to walk upright and smile.
A limberjack whittled from spare kindling wood
dancing in time
to a song he cannot hear.
whether there be prophecies, they shall fail;
whether there be tongues, they shall cease;
whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
Warnie's bad heart will go whoring.
Nolda will shine his shoes
and block his hat
before he goes, each night.
He will not work, citing his bad heart
his slow, cold blood.
He will trust this sleeping doctor
and never ask why.
I'll be carried to the new jail tomorrow
Leavin' my poor darlin' alone
With the cold prison bars all around me
And my head on a pillow of stone.
Saturnine Warnie fathers Bee-Bee Roark
on Nolda's sister Oggie
Nolda delivers Bee Bee
her husband and her sister's child
without complaint
and brings from her own body
Norma.
Norma, pig-pink
squalling for milk
an infant mouse
a blind worm.
Born in the house
bought with takings from the post office job.
The house that stands, today, open
with broken windows
and food on the table
a ruined house of silverfish
and wet-black decay
crumbling paper and rot
mice nesting in the chewed books
the wallpaper mouldering from the walls in ragged strips.
Not even the worst or most haunted
of the houses that I dream in.
This house.
Resting place for the safe
empty iron crypt of history
dragged across the frozen river
housing only paper now
housing the gun
the bloodguilt of a nameless man
and his ghost
birth certificates with floral blue borders.
TheseLares et Penates
these prayerless iron godsof my house
indifferent to petition.
Norma Risener grows
at the foot of the hill
in the house built with stolen money
in Scioto Furnace.
Before the city water comes,
the houses all unplumbed
in her fathers store
Roark Risener Dry Goods and Grocery
on Dogwood Ridge
that knot of flowers
till she is Sixteen
and the road comes through the holler.
In Appalachia, they say the dogwood
was the tree used to crucify Christ
cursed to never again grow large enough
to build a cross, or a gibbet.
.
They say it flowers in Easter
when Christ comes out of the earth.
(That winter sun thawing the hollows,
that groundhog, that black bear)
That the robins are still splashed with blood
from when they lifted the crown
of thornwood, the knots of whose brush
tangle on the ridges like razor-wire.
Everything is holy.
Every ridge is the place of sacrifice.
Every hilltop the place of the skull.
Everywhere is the center of the world.
I have stood atop the hills
and called to the frozen stars
and they have answered
in a still small voice.
The road that comes
is what will be state route 140
a winding track through the hills
a road I have seen witchlights hover over
in thick fog
like a red blood bell on the road
an intelligible sphere
a car for the black sun
like Jack with his lantern
unwelcome in heaven and hell.
A ghost-thick path
that creeps through wheel-less rusting cars
past road side pigpens
past dogwood and thornwood,
past black birds and brambles
and boarded-up gas stations
toward Jackson
north into the flat heart of Ohio.
Woe, woe, woe,
to the inhabitants of the earth
Edward Walker (called Pete) from Wapokoneta
a town which will birth
the first man to set foot on the moon
comes with the Civilian Conservation Corps,
building the road,
all slick brown hair and slicker talk.
In the furnace it is summer
and Norma is in her parent's store,
selling DRY GOODS and COLD ICE CREAM
as the sign says,
selling COLD BEER and HOT COFFEE
in her sixteenth summer.
Edward is thirty, and thirsty with the dry years
when first they meet.
The girl from the Furnace
and the moon-man from Wapokoneta.
(Pale as a bluebottle worm)
Death hangs over the ice cream and the dry goods
the cold beer and hot coffee
death is thick in the kisses of Edward Walker.
Like thornwood and flowers.
Evadna Jean Walker
their first child
lives eight brief days.
Her kidneys failing,
the uric acid and toxins
burning holes through her body
and ever after, among my family
there is nervous checking of diapers
after every birth
the memory of the burned child
eaten from within.
Blame poison water, or bad blood's welling
blame the cracked-snake helix of our ancestry
blame the sulpher fog, the coal-ash water
the sleeping dark of the mine
blame lead pipes and paint
Or the coal scrubbers,
The absentee landlords,
the buyers of mineral rights
the devourers of the under and the black
blame luck, or fortune, or the blindness of the angels
blame the hobbled god
the limping devil
the cold, indifferent sun
or liver-spotted hands of the saints
In a photograph, Edward Walker and Norma
stand in front of the grocery
his face is crueler, older
hardened already by drink and loss
Norma is wrapped in fur
her face frozen in the moment
looking forward towards the doom that comes,
sure as a filmed locomotive.
Sure as winter.
Sure as woe.
At nineteen, in her bed,
burning with fever
Norma's mind dissolves to a single hot coal.
The midwives and witch-women confer
place a blade under her birthing bed.
To cut the pain, to cut the flow of blood
In blood.
Above a knife's edge.
Through the ruin of her mother's body
comes Joyce Ann Walker.
Take boneset for cold.
Take Poke for rheumatism.
Jimsonweed for Asthma (not too much.)
Sassafras for cleaning blood.
Wild Cherry for coughs.
To cure a child of Asthma
measure him with a stick of sourwood
hide it in the chimney
when he outgrows the stick, he outgrows the sickness
To stop the flow of blood, a bloodstopper can
recite Ezekiel 16:6 and pass hands over the wound
but there are no stoppers of blood
of that flood of history for Norma
and death comes like fire in dry brush
like a hole burnt in film,
like the mine falling in,
like the silver bridge falling
like the burning of a meth-lab house
like a cloudbloom of poison in the river
like coal-ash in a creek
comes the blood.
To heal a burn, say:
“There came an angel from the East
bringing fire and frost.
In frost, Out fire.
In the name of the Father,
Son and the Holy Ghost.”
Edward Walker, drunk on Rittenhouse Rye and sorrow
self pity mixed with whiskey and water
blackly drunk on the nothing that he has
this burn that cannot be healed,
this fire,
this frost
that burns the world to cinders.
Lies down on the train tracks
the rain coming down like a cow
pissing on a flat rock.
A train coming.
Sure as winter.
Sure as woe.
The Norfolk and Southern
splits his head open like a melon.
Warnie and Nolda leave the child in the hospital
for the first, endless July of her life.
She is fed, and changed, a screaming orphan
She is nursed by cold ghosts
in a loud, white sound.
In 1934
John Dillinger meets with three bullets
his father says
That's not my boy
That August, comes Lil Abner
the outhouse-crescent-cutter
come Dogpatch,
come Daisy Mae Scraggs
come Pansy Hunks
come Lucifer Ornamental Yokum
come Nightmare Alice
come Moonbeam McSwine
come Jubilation T. Cornpone
all my kin.
Nolda and Warnie hang a picture in The House
(where the gun sleeps in its metal crypt)
of Norma
pretty in her casket
among the lilies
They hang one more picture beside it.
High on nails
Joyce, fat in Sunday clothes,
perched awkwardly on her mother's grave.
They take Joyce, adopt her for her inheritance
her father's head
a pinata full of money
a bone-safe
A conjer-ball
buy Risener's Cafe, on Front street
in Portsmouth, Ohio.
(A bar for the riverfront
for the poor who roll downhill
till they come to the water's edge
for the rats that come up from the river
their eyes shining
their coats glossy
and sleek as beaver
big as rabbits)
Here is whiskey
and the soft song of it.
The shine of threadbare bar stools
of afternoon light
through hand-smeared windows.
Here are men
too rudely shaped for war
and laughing women
with powder-red cheeks
and stockings with black seams.
Here is beer, cold in a brown bottle
and river-ice hoarded in straw
and Texas swing on the wireless.
A world built against the day outside
the dead on the French hills
in the mountains of Italy
in northern Africa, and the Pacific
over the hills and far away.
Here is the lie of safety, and the brown bottles
and the men fighting in the gravel at night
and the women drunk, and the dead
outside the window looking in
the music, the left-behind
the lame and the nearsighted
dancing in a whirl of light.
Warnie calls Joyce “Pee Wee”,
in mockery of her thick and ungainly body
One hundred and fifty pounds in first grade
takes her with him
to whorehouses and honky tonks
to brown bottles and river ice
a drinking buddy, a son, a lover.
Warnie teaches Pee wee
How to hold and point the family gun, that devil's fiddle
How to charm a whore, how to cheat at cards
How to cuss and fight like a boy
How to keep a secret.
Norma still blocks his hat
and shines his shoes
when the bad heart
and slow blood rises in him.
Now that bad heart has a companion
and instead of her sister
it is her grandchild
born in her daughter's death
that takes her husband away in the night.
Off to the whores of the hotel Hurth
to whiskey and black water.
Does her dead girl keep her company
in her long and lonely vigils?
Does she burn, still, on the knife edge
between one world and another?
In another home, a birth remains nameless for three years
another hungry mouth in an overburdened house
in a crush of brothers and sisters
child of Beatrice and Howard Russell
Brother of Garland
of Buford
of Winford
of Jim
of Joe
and of Falkie Deem (called Deemie).
He calls himself “Mirror”
the only word he has for self
and this will, in time
through the alchemy of speech
and the familial shape of names
become Milford.
Pee Wee paints houses
buys herself a second-hand 1949 Triumph Thunderbird
She fights with men
drinks whiskey
rides her motorcycle into the lake
while standing on her head.
She is barroom bravado and swagger:
She wears a studded leather belt
that spells out “Joyce”
handsome, if never pretty.
She sells ice cream and dry goods
cold beer and hot coffee,
frys hamburgers in a corner of
Roark & Risener Dry Goods and grocery.
Milford is too poor for Brylcreem
melts Morrell brand Snow Cap Lard on the stove,
to style himself a perfect duck's ass haircut.
On cold days the fat recongeals
white and opaque as candle wax.
Pee-Wee tells Clorene, her best friend
that this is the man she will marry.
Milford is pretty and useless
but he struts, a bantam cock
into the smell of sizzling meat
ICE CREAM and COFFEE.
Joyce wants him
the way poor girls want tinsel
want something shiny, cheap
a carnival mirror
shoplifted drug store lipstick.
The way a catfish follows the oil
through the lightless river
the smell of congealed blood-bait
of breadballs and WD40.
Moonbeam Mcswine & Sadie Hawkins
Warnie's bad heart offers Pee-Wee a car
if she will not marry Milford
If she will remain his only
bride of the slow blood
but she is adamant
and they elope
with only the Triumph.
Milford rides on the back
an ornament, a mirror for Joyce
his larded hair glistening in the heat.
Bloodbait
They have only daughters.
Each dutifully checked
for the poison that eats from within.
Each with it's own bad heart growing in her center
like a thornwood tree
like a coiled copperhead
each a lure for something hungry in the dark.
I was so hungry my belly thought my throat was cut
Pee Wee takes pills to keep her weight down
Amphetamine and Dextro-amphetamine,
called Biphetamine
called Black Beauty
called Black Bombers
called Black Birds
though her pregnancies.
The black capsules, those magic beans
transform in amphetamine psychosis
to clowders of invisible cats
and Joyce, in fitful night terrors
calls out, over and over again
Put the cat out. Put the cat out.
When there is not, has never been a cat.
A story told in Kentucky tells how Jack
who had never been afraid
(that killer of giants, that climber of beanstalks
that headstand-trick rider, that handsome boy)
left in search of work, and came to a town
with a haunted mill.
If a man could stay three nights
and live, the curse would be lifted
the miller and his wife would fill a flour-sack
with gold.
On the first night, the dead boys came
and bowled with skulls
and Jack whittled them down
so they would roll
gambled and drank whiskey with the dead boys.
Blue as a coal tattoo, cold as river-ice
On the second night, the drowned girls came up from the pond
trailing minnows and rotting catfish, with weeds in their hair
and bluebottle flies and Jack fiddled all night,
and the dead girls danced, white as dogwood flowers
till the sun rose.
On the third, while Jack cooked his dinner
came the cats, all long and rangy,
black as a tar road.
put the cat out
Gathered round, hissing, said sop doll
tried to dip their paws in his soup-beans
till Jack took his buck knife
and cut off one of the cat's paws
and threw it in the corner.
In the morning, the miller come round
and said his wife was feeling poorly
and Jack pulled the blanket off her
and her hand was gone, the bed soaked in gore.
These bloody beds. Where stories start and stop.
Pee-Wee's cats climb on the ridge of the roof
on the headboard. They are eyes in the dark
come to steal the babies' breath.
They are the pills, endless succession,
gleaming black, preventing sleep
the lead-gas addled rumble of the Triumph
scream of the Thunderbird
dream-trance voice of the Sleeping Prophet.
When the first girl comes
she comes in blood
above a knife's edge
(to cut the pain)
the blood soaks through
the mattress, and falls on the blade
the bed as bloody as the miller's wife
as her mother's ruin.
The girl is named Norma Jean, after her
still wrapped in lilies on the wall
black and white as a tree in winter.
Unknowable mother
her dead eyes under glass.
That giant, that god
that soapstone wonder
that stone face in a river.
Then comes Neva Dean, my mother
the four still ride only the Triumph
the groceries hanging in the saddlebags
the babies between them,
sticky with sweets
the bike heavy and slow
on the road her father built
through the thornwood,
the cross-trees thick with ghosts.
Joyce will say of Milford
I had to teach him how to spell his name
but at least he was a handsome man
He will work in the store
propping bare feet up on the counter
trimming his nails with the bologna knife
Snuffy Smith and Lil' Abner
Dogpatch and Graceland
He fathers two more children on Joyce
Nina Lene and Naomi Lynne.
Those black cats
clustered around the birthing bed.
Their bodies black and starless
Their eyes wide as dinner-plates
The bad hearts spinning in their chests
like dynamos in the dam.
Milford feeds milk to his blue-tick hounds
(bought on credit in the grocery)
and lets his children go hungry.
When Joyce runs off with another man for a week
bowling with skulls, dancing with drowned girls
he does not feed his daughters for five days.
Naomi hugs a litter of hound pups to death
so lonesome for something soft.
The house is untended and shuttered.
Warnie keeps cows in the barn
and the ghosts of the dead man, of Norma
come from the safe
the bed
press their dogwood-blossom faces
against the windows.
Maggot white.
Neva is left at the house at the morning milking
and picked up at evening milking
she goes to school in the furnace,
Hananiah, Misha'el, Azaria
(Her hands beaten bloody with a yardstick,
a stick of sourwood she never outgrows)
though she lives above the bar,
in town.
Each day she sits, her back to the window
so as not to see the dead man's face
she stands with the cows for warmth
in the steaming barn
and her grandmother's ghost stands with her.
The grave is cold.
Joyce and Milford leave the girls
in the care of Milford's sister Eveline, thirteen.
Norma cuts herself digging in the creek
and runs to the neighbor
with blood pooled in her hands.
Neva severs Nina's finger with a shovel
digging holes.
They feed the furnace till it glows
red as a poker, and are stayed
from throwing water on it
and blowing the house apart
by Milford's brother Joe
who has dreamed of them, alone.
Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail
Joe comes in time to grab Eveline's arm
Joe waits with the girls
until Milford returns
and beats him through the house,
breaking tables.
for he has rescued us from Hades
and saved us from the hand of death,
and delivered us
from the midst of the burning fiery furnace;
from the midst of the fire
he has delivered us.
Joyce tires of Milford's empty handsomeness
carnival mirror image of a man,
dusty tinsel and greasy cherry lipstick.
She leaves
and abandons the girls with Nolda
already ancient
they call her Granny
the witch in the woods in the candy house
Nightmare Alice and Scary Lou
the not-mother, not mother to their own.
She teaches them:
I don't hate you, honey
I just hate your ways
teaches them:
if you want to be purty
wash yore face with a baby diaper
(ammonia in linen)
teaches them:
Shall we gather by the river?
Joyce claims Warnie's gun
waking it from the iron box,
and dreams of murder
and shoots her first man, Duffy Rollins
outside the 440 Bar on Market and Second
Duffy survives.
A carnival trick-rider
with a bullet in his teeth.
The girls cluster together, motherless
a whispering conclave of cats.
They crawl through the hole in the wall
into the bar after closing
steal popsicles and treats,
and eat until they are sick.
Gather shoes into bed at night
to throw at the rats.
Grow wild and untended.
Sleep four in a bed, crosswise.
Catch chiggers in tall grass
and are slathered in salt and Crisco.
Like she was going to fry us.
Neva says.
One night, Joyce appears at the window
with Duffy Rollins
the sideshow wonder
the man was pierced and did not die
and the girls gather in their nightgowns.
She is at the helm of a truck
filled with a hoard
stolen from a school.
She throws them a globe,
a gift of the world,
and vanishes into the dark.
Warnie's bad heart rises
a cancer of the groin
a whore's blossoms
a killer's killer.
A catfish big as a Volkswagen
breaks through the frozen river
of the slow, cold blood
and swallows him down to hell.
Bloodbait and oil
The door in the fishes mouth.
The fountain of cats.
Barbed mouth of the dark hollow.
black water
Joyce is arrested for whoring at the Hotel Hurth.
Nolda hides the morning paper from the girls.
The neighbors shove the paper through the mail slot
letters that need no addresses.
There is Joyce, famous and unknowable
A newspaper cipher, a bubblegum riddle.
A dream in the night with the world in her hand.
Filled with criminal glamour and bad ideas.
Milford remarries, a woman with daughters
brags to his brother Joe about hishouseful of whores
and how he is availing himself of them.
Joe beats him senseless, again.
A cure that will not take.
There is no stopping the flow of bad blood,
no exorcism by ass-whipping.
And Joe is off to Vietnam.
I meet Milford once, we go gathering hay bales
in a battered blue Chevy pick-up.
He offers me a Hamm's beer from a six-pack ring.
He offers me a plug of Red Man chewing tobacco from his pouch
At the age of six, my arms trembling
I strain to lift the hay bale into the truck,
see the dry and dead fields from a rainless summer.
Listen to Hank Williams on the radio.
In the great book of John
We're warned of the day
when we'll be laid
beneath the cold clay.
We fish once and only once,
for bluegills in a shallow creek.
The minnows hooked through their eyes for bait
lure no channel-cats or hellmouth.
He shows me a raccoon in a cage,
savage and miserable
more prisoner than pet.
When he is dying,
I go with his daughters
to gather his cattle for slaughter,
to pay his hospital bills.
The sisters stand, frightened in the mud
and in the end, I drive the cows up the plank alone.
His new children do not thank me
At his funeral,
his flawless steel grey duck's ass haircut
a sharp black suit, and lilies.
Photographic flash in the viewing room.
Lights him like a crooner,
like a criminal, famous
The Hillbilly Cat.
Dead houses on his land
fill with dent corn and rats,
with broken windows.
His cows hang from hooks,
their black blood draining.
Weep no more, my lady
Oh, weep no more, today
He leaves me this:
For 'shine, take sweet hog feed and white loaf sugar
and Red Star bread yeast, let it brew. Don't drink the low wine
or the doubles, and throw away the heads and tails.
A cinnamon stick and some apple juice
will make it so's a lady can drink it.
Even this a lie, words I place in his mouth.
A scrawl of ink from some distant relative
the family recipes
Beans and cornbread
with a ham hock
sausage gravy
red-eye gravy
drop biscuits
7-up cake
Pineapple upside-down cake
Jelly from Possum grapes,
Dandelion wine
and sugar-washed shine.
All learned second or third-hand
as an alien, an outsider, an onlooker.
Too late to Christmas,
we eat cold leftovers
from the foil pans.
I have learned my hymns and union-songs
from the borrowed hiss of vinyl
My banjo-roll from a yard-sale book.
Hank Williams and The Louvin Brothers
Loretta Lynn and Woody Guthrie
Webb Pierce and Jimmie Rodgers the yodeling brakeman
Jean Ritchie and Maybelle Carter and The Hillbilly Cat
Merle Travis and Hazel Dickens
Florence Reese, forever asking
Which side are you on?
all my kin.
Joyce marries Arthur “Bud” Kitchen
who she plucks
from a bar on Second Street.
A man with more courage than sense.
He takes a mistress named Anna May
and JoyceBusts all the winderlights out of the house.
Bink, (husband of Falkie Deem) is bartending
and Anna May sits at the bar.
Joyce comes in, a black hat
a fighting man at high noon
saysI'm a goin to go home and fetch my gun
returns with the fiddle in hand
and plays a tune for dancing
shooting the woman through the vagina, and bar stool.
The bloodstain remains on the ceiling
my family's mark in Portsmouth, Ohio.
Anna May is rushed to a hospital
and loses so much blood, they suction it
from the operating table, and shoot it back in
like the Miller's wife
like Norma, before the lilies
She bleeds and bleeds.
And when I passed by thee,
and saw thee wallowing in thy blood,
I said unto thee: In thy blood, live; yea,
I said unto thee: In thy blood, live;
The doctor has to change in the yard
when he comes home
looking like a slaughterhouse
like an abattoir
in butcher's red and white.
Anna May lives, to piss herself
for the rest of her life.
Joyce goes to Marysville
to the Ohio Reformatory for Women
Because she aimed for the offending part
and not for the heart or head of Anna May.
She spends a brief soujourn there
learns to knit
learns to measure her time in cigarettes
learns to try to love Jesus.
When she comes from prison
she towers in her heels and yellow pants.
A Kool dangling from the painted wound of her mouth.
The neighbors say “A Giant is here for you”.
They are always Giants,
who build the roads, the hills
Who rend the world apart
whose borrowed bones
shield us from the stars' destroying light
from whom Jack steals
the golden eggs of the sun, and fire.
Joyce the Giant, who vanishes, is shot
on December 15, 1967
the day the Silver Bridge collapses.
46 people fall to their deaths in the black water.
A man with membranous wings is seen in the wood
and the world comes apart
but the giant does not die.
Pee Wee, the Giant, the devourer, the undying
everything but mother
(her heart a hospital, a loud white sound
the roar of a gun, a ruined house)
takes the girls
takes the safe
takes Warnie's gun
that killed a man in Kentucky
that shot Duffy Rollins
That shot Anna May
Take's Warnie's ghosts in her mouth
to Hobart Eugene Mcginnis
called Red.
Red as a house-fire, as a coal grate
as a playing-card devil.
Hot as a two-peckered billygoat.
Hot as a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.
She will die married to this man,
an illiterate, a dealer in second-hand cars.
A trucker, with a short temper and a heavy hand.
I will first taste whiskey in his house, at six.
From a plastic dispenser marked
break glass in case of emergency
Red, in his folly, will take a mistress.
Pee-Wee hears them on the phone,
her bad heart rising
Is Joyce-Ann still your little poodle dog? asks the woman
and Red laughs, and assents.
break glass in case of emergency
The fiddle comes out, and plays its only tune.
Red is shot in the mouth.
He flops on the linoleum,
Joyce Anne lights a Kool 100
and sits at the kitchen table
flipping ashes in a tiny cast-iron pan.
Red pounds himself against the floor
a catfish in the bottom of an aluminum boat
hooked through the lip
the dial-tone coming through the phone.
Joyce calls her daughter Naomi,
says "Come over, I've kilt Red "
but when Naomi comes
Red is floundering on the ground
and once the blood is cleaned from the floor
and the gun hidden well away in the safe
It is eventually clear that he will not die.
An ambulance is called.
He can write nothing but his name.
Cannot speak, his mouth swaddled in bandages.
he was a-cleaning his gun says Joyce
says Pee Wee,
says Warnie's ghost in Pee-Wee's mouth
say the black cats in harmony
say the dead boys blue and cold
and Red is stitched together, a quilt.
The doctors will say
That Red was doomed to die,
a clot in his brain had given him violent headaches
made him short tempered, volatile.
Say he was cured by the bullet.
That bled out the devil, the clot, the bad humour
the black birds that roosted in his head.
Red's heart monitors go wild
every time Joyce comes into the room,
his mouth bandaged shut
his letterless hands mute
The doctors think him excited.
Glad to see his loving wife.
He returns home, and Joyce and Red fill
their childless house with dolls.
Apple-heads and Mammies
Porcelain and velvet
and rag doll daughters
who never cry.
Go to a double-wide church
with a paint on velvet Jesus
with plaster praying hands.
Naomi takes the gun
and fires it at her husband, wildly
when he is caught with another woman
breaks her arm in the struggle.
she takes the safe, and The House
grows weed in the roofless smokehouse.
Their daughter is run over by a car
and stitched together, a quilt
her bones all broken
held together by a shining cage
and she the frantic raccoon within.
In her adulthood she will favor speedballs
will make crystal meth in her garage
will arrive at the funeral of my sister's child, babbling nonsense
her husband nodding out in the bathroom
the whiskey priest kicks the door in.
She calls me, when her child is pregnant
to ask how to procure an abortifacient
to slip in the child's drink unaware.
I do not help
do not say Pennyroyal.
Yarrow, Saffron, Rue, Tansy
I spit them out, slow
all the bird-bones of your secrets
that time has made smooth as stone
minnows hooked through the eyes.
Joyce and Red run McGinnis Trucking
a fleet of Mack Trucks, a used car lot
keep a billy goat tied to a tree stump
porcelain turtles with pink human genitals
keep books with leather covers
INCREASE YOUR PSYCHIC POWER!
UNIVERSAL MAGNETISM
THE SLEEPING PROPHET
in a dusty attic
and grow old.
Neva Dean Russell has grown,
from the wild and feral child greased for her chiggers
from the girl with the ghosts at her back
from the child with her knuckles beaten bloody
because she could not let the others answer
to a homely valedictorian and has gone off to college.
In Athens Ohio, a town nestled in the hills.
Atop the bones of the Adena and the Hopewell
the giants, the builders of mounds,
the carvers of obsidian hands
home to Ohio University
the Athens Lunatic Asylum
demon-haunted Simm's Cemetery and it's hangman tree.
The brakeman ghost of Moonville tunnel.
She meets my father, a man so ugly
that he must bring a pizza when he comes to see her
so no one will know she is sleeping with him.
They have a shotgun wedding
beneath the implacable stare of plaster saints.
The troll in Bakelite glasses, the homely bride
pose smiling in a green field
in front of a willow, far from the river
the sisters all bridesmaids
Red and Joyce not in attendance
Bill and Naomi, high, in checked polyester.
Down in the willow garden
where me and my lover did meet
She does not know when he was a boy he wired his radio
to pick up 1170 AM WWVA, Wheeling West Virginia
those thin hillbilly voices crackling
a promise of some other life
something not built of Polka and Slovak
muttered under the breath.
She does not know the willow tree
is a transplant from the south
carefully sprouted in a Coke bottle
and grown along with the boy
a sourwood stick in a northern chimney.
She does not know he wants to inhabit
the snakeskin she hopes to leave
dry and empty
hanging in the dogwood trees,
they haunt each other
each a mask the other hopes to wear.
And in Portsmouth Ohio
(that dying city atop the mounds
that graveyard of shoe factories and steel mills
that cursed and holy place) in 1975
I enter the story.
Neva and Allen leave school with no degrees
and Al takes a job in the Jones and Laughlin Steel Mill
in Indiana. He builds bridges and cranes,
then works in the coke plant
keeps ancient machinery running.
He is coated always in red dust and grease,
in rust, and oil, and coke
wears heavy steel boots,
his clothes covered in pinhole burns.
We go to live in a rented farmhouse,
on a pig and cattle farm
my first memories are here.
The cattle towering over me
grazing amidst cars on blocks
dead tractors and a useless crane
the cars rotting on their axles
pink mice in the upholstery and
glove compartments
the engines parted out.
The mirrors glinting in the tall grass.
The smell of sun-cracked vinyl.
Brown-eyed susans coarse and nodding
chicory between the corn
poison ivy coiling through collapsing outbuildings.
The smell of pigshit.
The squealing pink pigs
getting loose from the pen
looking through the windows in winter.
A swarm of black ants with their babies
in their teeth.
And Sara Ann, called Jane is born
From ruin to ruin we move.
We buy a house
on Rural Route Three, box 1368
with tarpaper patched roof and settling floor,
with a black rotary phone wired into the wall
a dirt floored extension
we fill with engines
and truck tires,
with chickens and mouldering paper.
My father ties the chickens to the fence
when he cuts off their heads
We pluck the feathers in bright handfulls,
soft down from the belly,
stiff quills from the wings
Pull the tendon in the severed feet
till they close, terrorize the neighbor kids
raise a terrible, one-legged goose,
a dog that bites
fill the yard with cars,
two convertibles with rotting ragtops
two International Travel-Alls
two International Scouts,
one a mail truck with wrong-handed steering
a primer-red 1938 International harvester truck
with a winch and snowplow
A 4-door Chrysler sedan, 3 motorcycles,
and half a Volkswagen
and the zoning man comes around,
gingerly stepping through the tall grass
in his penny-loafers.
And Elizabeth Mary comes, and after her Rachel Danielle,
by another man but bearing our name.
And this seems far from the hills,
though our neighbors are from West Virginia
hunt squirrels on our acre in the summertime,
though their house is more shack than ours
and it is here I hear the word Hillbilly for the first time.
Always in reference to the former owners, the Heighleys
who roofed with carpet tacks
and put carpet tacks in the rug.
Who let the beams rot
and the floor sag
whose fault it was the ceilings burst
and the insulation hung in tatters
that the raccoons fucked in the attics
that the mice ran
along the tops of the cabinets.
Those mythical architects of our squalor
the hillbillies
who lived there before us.
Because we are not hillbillies.
Though the yard fills
with rusting cars,
with wringer-washers filled with gasoline
and air conditioners
with hives of yellow jacket wasps
garter-snakes and toads in the tall grass.
My youngest sister Rachel
drinks Coca-cola as an infant,
knocks over the bottles
to suck the sweetness from the filthy carpet
her teeth rot black before she is four
and are capped in gleaming silver.
Q. What separates a hillbilly from an asshole?
A. The Ohio River.
Though the house fills with mice, with televisions
with radios and disassembled engines
with boxes of tubes, an oscilloscope.
The raccoons grow tame enough to feed by hand.
Though my dog, off his rope, eats the baby ducks.
Though the rabbits freeze in the winter.
The chickens stand outside the warped door
then bleed out lashed to the rusted iron fence.
Though the carpet grows bare and bald
and the wood shines through.
Though the apples and pears
rot on the ground
and the wasps crawl over them.
Though the record player warbles with Loretta Lynn
and Red Sovine,
the recorded language of a far off country.
Though the sink crawls with blue bottle-fly maggots.
Though my father's incest and ramshackle house
makes us the punchline of every hillbilly joke.
We are not hillbillies.
Q. How do you circumcise a hillbilly?
A. Kick his daughter in the jaw
We are northern, and Catholic, and Slovak
and the Heighleys, like the Adena,
or the Scioto who had gone before
are the Hillbillies,
and the Gurneys, who burn crosses
and stew squirrels, fry their brains in scrambled eggs
who fish for catfish in a hand-dug pond
eat possum and raccoon and woodchuck
are Hillbillies
and the Dugards, the coon-asses
who have almost as many junk cars as us are hillbillies
but we are far from the hills, and are not.
Q. Why can't you convict a hillbilly of a crime?
A. They all have the same DNA, and no dental records.
We have broken the ties of history
the black birds and bad hearts
have no power over us,
the gun is in its safe in The House.
When the tree falls on the house, it is just bad fortune
we live with the roof split open
the ceiling sagging down to touch the floor
eyes shining in the dark
scratch and scramble in the walls.
Oil-rich smell of blood and terror
my fathers hands
his confessionless mouth
blessed by a good Italian priest.
Only say the word and I shall be healed
The dead mouse stuck in the vacuum tube
and it's tail slid under the door
I sit with my back to keep him out.
The dead thing flicking against my back.
Again and again.
My father's high pitched laugh.
We are free, whatever free can mean
in that ruin, that wild place
with the numbers scratched on the mailboxes with a pocket knife
that road's loose suggestions of gravel
that led nowhere but back
to the haunted house, the chapel perilous.
In the room of ruin,
a picture of Warnie and Nolda, framed in gold
those terrifying ancestors, looking over the rotting couch,
the cobwebbed glass lamp
the roof open to the rain, and the stars.
I dream it still, the aquariums filled with dead leaves
and Warnie' implacable, proprietary stare.
That room where I hid with the bleeding whelp
behind my knee from my father's belt.
That room where the dead bowled with skulls
and the drowned girls danced
where the black cats held their congregation
till the fire took it all.
Q. What do a hillbilly divorce and a tornado have in common?
A. Someone's losing a trailer
When Neva leaves, with Rachel and her father
the boy across the street, sixteen and useless
and bound for the Marines
We believe the ruin is all we have inherited.
While she marries on a beach, her silver-toothed
babe in arms, we, left with a photograph
a shipwreck of a house
the eyes of the mice gleaming in the dark.
When the boy is in the Philippines
she returns, and takes up whoring
at the Al-Khazar Topless Bar.
There is no mention of bad hearts
or newspapers stuffed through mail slots
or the Hotel Hurth.
When she feeds her daughters to her husbands
like minnows hooked through the eyes, bloodbait
like cattle forced up the plank and onto the truck
when she teaches them how to charm a whore
to cheat at cards, to keep a secret
there is nothing but silence.
And God is mute and deaf as a principal.
Mother, how you passed them through the fire
under cover of flute and drum
so much coal shoveled into the Moloch
of his bed, the stink of steel mill and unwashed flesh
stained yellow in the sheets
How you left us in the ruin
Your favorite perched on your arm
a pet with silver teeth
the rain coming through the roof
into chipped yellow enamelled pots
mushrooms growing from the carpets
This chosen child calls the police
in her twenties
because of the secret messages her boyfriend
has painted in the shadows of the wall
because of the hidden microphones
that record her thoughts
the secret language of dogs
the spinning eyes of cats in the dark
meth and biphetamine and ether and cocaine
they commit her to hospital for cocaine-induced psychosis.
Now she eats her own young
your special child, runs to her own final beach
her children so many packed bags
left on the dock, a learned art
she thinks she will take one
will preserve one chosen pet, and leave the other
her mother's monster in every respect.
Asks me to write a love poem
to commemorate the act.
To sing to cover the screams
as they are passed through the fire
When my stepfather teaches me how to steal
how to lie, the easy patter of con-charm.
Always flirt, even if you don't mean it
it keeps your hand in
There is no invocation of the blood,
no mention of the ghosts that clot the air
thick as milk, as smoke from a burning house.
I will not tell the lie of my sister's love
How to charm a whore.
When he gives me my first knife
I like the fit of it in my hand
know it for an artist's tool
I will not carve a monument to this repeated crime
How to cheat at cards.
How I glory that knife, alone in the dark
a silver tongue of prayer, a Hosannah
It is 1984, and I stand over my sleeping parents
think to avenge the blows my mother demanded
think to hang all our failings on that goat and offer him up
and slake that ancient thirsty thing
that hangs over me while I sleep, and whispers
think to choose one face for the devil, to kill the giant.
(To cut the pain, to cut the flow of blood.)
Every knife is the threshold of a door
a bright bridge between one world and the next
How to keep a secret.
When he borrows back the knife
and loses it to security in a Tijuana dance-hall
I feat I have lost my ticket
for the gopher-snake, the copperhead of highway
back to the ruins we had left, the bag I keep packed
after he splits my mothers lip with his keys
after the screaming and the tears, the stitches
the broken windows and the broken tables
the Military police throwing him in the shower
the less than honorable discharge.
In my twenties I hitchhike the road west from Ohio
with a straight razor in my back pocket
a bag on my back
a cook-pot hobo-jangling with every step
retracing my steps.
Flat land and endless crucifixion of telephone wires
Wheeling crows and red-tail hawks
flat ribbon of highway
though the hills and mines.
The mill towns and river bottoms
are there, though the faces carved on the stones
in the river are ours
we cannot return.
We are a homeless people
and nothing has been promised us.
In High school, after the fire
takes the house the Heighleys built
takes Warnie and Nolda's portrait down to hell.
After the cars are hauled away
the pond filled with scrap
the frogs shout atop the old washers
the pears lay rotten on the ground
the wasps sing over them.
Old Mister Gurney is dead from heart failure
and his grapes wither on the iron fence.
After the Ocean at night
and the death I do not find there
after a time in Athens
that haunted house
the perilous chapel
where I did not ask the right question:
I come again to the cursed city, the doleful city.
Portsmouth, Ohio
you doomed clot of river mud
inverted bowl of foundry smoke.
You habitation of vultures.
You ruin.
You unholy cauldron.
You stolen junkie's dream.
You crumbling stone on a chain.
O Babel, O Carthage, O Babylon, O Dis
of electric light and color television
of empty houses silent
and the poison ghosts of cold factories.
You pill-mill. You meth lab.
You whiskey-bottle basement.
Portsmouth, you devourer of your children.
You Leviathan of drug stores and doctors.
Behemoth of bad ideas.
Frankenstein tavern
of Cocaine, Methamphetamine
Dilaudid, Oxycodone, Oxycontin
Morphine dermal packs.
City of toilet tank lids
and dinner plates
of metal tubes and rolled dollars
Keystone and Old Milwaukee.
You shipworm-rotten plank I am carved from.
You funeral barge of black coal.
You cold smokestack.
I came to you innocent of blood and wonder
sure that Chicago and the libraries and schools of Athens
had prepared me to be a criminal, a conman
a sideshow talker
a bally man
a snake oil vender
a faith healer
a tongue like a knife.
“Do you smoke?” they asked me.
I proffered a crumpled pack of Camels
but soon I had learned
my apothecary's abecedarium:
Shake-weed and leaf
Gnarled and grotesque buds
Menagerie of fantastic roots,
Closet-grown fungus
Vials of acid, dripped on candy
Terrible powders
offered in a smear
of blue dust on a dinner plate.
Pills purloined from a mother's purse
Sleeplessness from the diet doctors
from Columbia and Mexico
cut with infant laxative and ether.
Flowers for pain,
and for sleep.
All rounded with bottles
of whiskey, and beer.
Prescriptions for pain
a little poison for a pleasant sleep.
From that shipwreck I emerged
by luck by chance and the turn of fortune
Unpaid borrowed dollars in my pocket.
but I say them here that they remain deathless.
All the lost adventurers my peers
My mouthful of moths
clattering against the light.
Eric Deer and Tim Cantrell
Chuck Broughton and Tom King
Anson Edwards and Jay Ferguson
and Danny Bailey and Matt Stepp
that parade gone down to dust.
Ingrid, innocent and brighter
than all the other shades
nail through my tongue
brighter than fire to burn away the cancerous dust
the tired bricks, the sprung bridges
radio towers blinking their dull red light
over the bowl of the hills
like sentry towers in a prison
like blinded cyclops.
You alight like the sun on the hilltops
burn away the polluted river
stand, in your beam of perfect light, deathless
outside of history, you littlest of giants
and Angela, who died singing, and all the rest.
All, all, all my kin
Portsmouth you were never a city for children
who starved within your walls
the muddy water filled with corpses.
O mother holding her baby above the flood.
Poverty-house, burning ground where I was branded.
You Mountain Dew mouth.
You cancer.
You mournful saurian whine of train brake.
You yellow fog of coke plant.
You empty mill.
O my city, o ruin, o hilltop conflagration
where I called the seventy two devils
and found they all have one face
the rotten face of my father
of Warnie and his bad blood
generation upon generation.
O circle against the flood.
O Cyclopean ruin, O Pandemonium
piled by giants high in the mud
beside the poison river.
It is on your muddy bank I falter, Ohio.
Phlegethon, where the damned in torments fry
It is there, on the bottoms
amidst the bottles, the boiling blood
the moon-grin of desiccated catfish
the trash and groundhogs
the rope and detergent bottles
the wood of suicides
I am undone.
A dreamless body in the brown water.
A diver near the dam, a bridge-jumper.
A drunken swimmer against a swollen current.
A blind fish, a three legged frog.
A tumor-ridden rabbit the dogs won't eat.
I write this history for my children
who live far from the tint of your mud
and mourn their cousin forever tangled in it
among those roots
in the dark water.
For the drinkers of poison.
For the uplifters of serpents.
For teetotals and drunks.
For the distillers of shine, and crystal.
For the pill mills and the mound dwellers.
For the Union men, and the scabs shot on the train.
For the drowned, for the fishers of drowned men.
For the miners, the coal barge captains
the train-hoppers, the trestle-swimmers
the butchers, the bridge-jumpers, the blue Fugates
the property-lawyers, the king of the cowboys.
For the moon-men and ice cream women.
For the dead, and for the living.
For my sister, who wakes each day
with an empty cradle.
Who lives
in spite
of all of this, who lives.
Who leaves the dust on the plate
the bottle still sealed in bond
leaves the namelessness of sleep
each day, again and lives.
For my other sisters, who live as they must
in the fog of pills, the rattle of their own voices.
For myself, and my children.
What gods for us?
Carved expressionless faces on stones in the river?
Iron gods of gun and safe?
Petro-plastic Christ of my Slovak grandmother
with broken hands? Merciless gods?
Terrible gods, who regardeth not persons?
River-gods, green-toothed and insatiable?
Devourers of children, catfish-headed
mine-dark, house-fire-bright gods
of kicked-in windows and shouted prayer?
Gods of lightning and mud
and burst levies, the cleansing torrent
swollen with chicken coops and bleach bottles
with bodies and lumber?
Gods of the carried-along?
Gods of detritus, gods of flotsam?
What can I give of joy, and wonder, what music
against your inexorable flow, Ohio?
That is death, and death and death.
These sepia ancestors in their burned portrait.
These ruined houses, these bloody beds.
What stories are mine to tell?
What secrets must I keep?
What have we shored against the flood?
A banjo roll and shape note harmony
lined out hymnody from a broken throat.
We went once, to The House, armed with
candles and the Lesser Key of Solomon
with broken crystals and holy water
to trap old wily Warnie's ghost
that grinning blue devil
who swims in my blood like a fish.
We rattled our empty threats,
Ialdo saboath, Elohim, El, El Shadai
Abdya Hallya Hellizah Bellator, Bellony Soluzen
barbarous tongues of invocation.
Cocksure in jean jackets
and heavy metal tee shirts.
Shook God like a boogyman at the dead.
Shoplifted dinner tapers,
coil of incense smoke.
Hellhotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire
Sweating like a whore in church
in the fly-swarm of that endless summer.
We jumped in stone quarries, and swam in the river.
Climbed radio towers to howl
at thrones, orders, powers, dominions.
Spray-painted pentacles on concrete platforms.
Drank beer on stone ridges of the hills.
When the man who got our booze
sold his washing machine for beer money
and ripped the porch off his house
and slashed his wrists with bottle-glass.
When Moon walked the streets,
arguing with angels.
Man, that Purple.
When we drank in graveyards
and the woods behind the armory.
The unmowed fields thick with fireflies.
A summer of conjuration.
Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe
Clusters of black cats and birds,
bullets and Benzedrine
Crows and Catfish
gatekeepers of history
burst from the floor, the attic, the safe.
Clouds of starlings like plague
thorn-bearing robins
turkey buzzards and red-tailed hawks
in the flooded fields, they wheel
indignant smoke of cold fire
72 names and sigils never enough
bats in the streetlights.
The old bones and tools
are plowed to the surface
chipped flints
beads and potsherds.
The swimmers all go into the dark, one by one.
The paths to the hilltops grow over.
The houses of my dying city grow silent.
The thick grass is mown and dark.
The names carved and painted on the stones weather away
These are secrets that are not mine to tell:
Eric Deer shot morphine from dermal packs
with his father, a junkie lawyer, and his wife.
They left him to die on the floor.
Tim Cantrell died alone.
Chuck Broughton died on the toilet
of the SuperAmerica Gas Station
in the flickering light.
Tom King shot poison in his blood in Africa
building cell phone towers
and had his hands amputated
and his friends shot heroin into his stumps
and he died.
Anson Edwards died
and they wrote his name
on the end of the bar, and did lines off it.
Jaybird Ferguson closed the bar
for the last time
played boogie-woogie piano records
for death when he came for him.
Late at night,
while you're sleeping
you will hear my lonesome call
Danny Bailey drank himself to death
with unpainted canvases
and plaster falling to dust.
Matt Stepp died castled in pain.
And I have drank with these dead men
on the river bottoms
in the red light of the burning city
I carry their history in my mouth
They crowd the trench, and speak
while my family waits
in the grey asphodel
the dust thick in their eyes
like white velvet
wing-scale of West Virginia Whites
asbestos falling from a burst pipe
ice and river water.
These my kin, and also:
Great-Uncle Rainy P. Adams
his mules posed in black and white
on his Christmas cards
his children unmentioned.
Nolda, offered up to an accomplice
like a prime pig in trade for silence.
Her dead daughter.
Her granddaughter off to the whorehouses and
stuffed fat full of Warnie's secrets.
Neva left on the steps of a house full of unsleeping dead
her children in the rotten ruin of my father's bed.
My mother offers to her newest man
to sleep in bed with her granddaughters
my sisters children.
So much kindling for the furnace
that cannot be cooled.
Little fish to catch the larger.
Spends a corpse's money on a plastic face.
A face to meet the faces that you meet
the ugly child hides inside the steaming barn
the ghosts crowd behind her
thick as cream in the bucket.
My own inventory of apologies and amends
because I, too, am kin to the bad heart
the slow blood.
Have enacted all my lessons
brightest of students
and only now, unlearn, undo
unmake, unbreak.
Panderers and seducers
Malebolge, burning sand and tortured wood
Habitation of unclean birds
I will keep no secrets here.
Beyond the end of naming
I am sick with secret language,ohio ohio
swollen like a snake-bitten dog
with my parents crimes.
Ye are of your father the devil,
and the lusts of your father ye will do
Better to pray to the iron god.
Better to claim the hangman's pearls.
Like the trees of that final grove
this burning sand.
Break my branch, and words and blood
come burbling out. Come hissing.
Better that.
Harpies and furies nest in my branches.
I the habitation of woe
The tree growing from the burial mound
my roots entangled in the bones
and the unclean earth.
My broken, toothless mouth.
I am unclean, uneducated
poor white trailer trash
child of murderous blood
smeared over all
with the lusts of my father, the devil
so hungry my belly thinks my throat is cut
What then to praise?
Hang a kilt snake in a tree to make it rain
Raise the brazen serpent
Raise up that which is broken,
that which is cracked, and flawed
let light shine through the blue-chipped glass
of a broken pot, iridescent with long burial
let the house burn bright, a holocaust of offering
the piano-keys curling in poisonous smoke
the photographs
the stained and bloody beds
burned down to black iron
the rotten floorboards
the mice
the cattle
the pigs and cars and crane
let them all be transfigured utterly
into something incandescent, something holy
Shall we gather at the river?
Let the rain come and swell the Ohio
like a snake with a mouse in it's stomach
let the glutted mouth of hell sink and sleep in the mud
let the empty city fall into silence
and all her ghosts, and all her ghosts
sleep in the holy dark
Let the embers we have been ignite
the black coal of the world.
Let the streets burn hot below our feet.
Let the barges sink and strew
the coal on the river's bed.
We will sing.
In the burning house of history, we will sing.
In the collapsed mine's darkness visible.
In the dead towns and county-line-bars.
In the dry counties and Sunday service.
Lifting serpents, drinking strychnine, we sing
with broken teeth
with twang.
In my name shall they cast out devils;
they shall speak with new tongues;
They shall take up serpents;
and if they drink any deadly thing,
it shall not hurt them;
they shall lay hands on the sick,
and they shall recover.
Our mouths open in praise
confirming the word with signs following
in horror, in awe
we will sing of murder
and bodies and the riverside
we will sing of the unbroken circle
of the ice of time
and the graves of our parents
we will sing, poor, unshod
sick with our lungs black
riddled with cancer
from yellow smoke and dirty water
with the poisoned, holler-fill earth below our feet
I drew my saber through her
it was a bloody knife
I threw her in
the river
it was an awful sight
we will sing over the graves of our children
those toy strewn, flowered accusations thrown
in the blind face of god
we will sing praises in spite, in survival
in anger and through broken teeth
in sorrow and lamentation
will the circle be unbroken?
by the river we lay down and wept
and hanging our harps in the trees, we sing.
Sing happy are those who pass through the fire
happy are those who are dashed against the rocks
happy
sing
The Thunders of Judgment and Wrath are numbered
and are harbored in the North in the likeness of an oak,
whose branches are Twenty-Two Nests of Lamentation and
Weeping laid up for the Earth, which burn night and day:
and vomit out the heads of scorpions
and live sulphur myngled with poyson.
Sing of beasts before the throne
and the muddy river, of mountain-top removal.
Sing woe, woe, woe, to the earth
for her iniquity is, was and shall be great.
Sing throats of teeth, of Benzedrine and bullets
of blood and beds, coal-ash and arsenic but sing
tell everything. There is nothing secret
that does not rot.
There is no silence
in which we are not complicit.
Which side are you on?
Sing blessing and malediction.
Sing corn from the ground.
Sing rain and fish and company scrip.
Sing plenty, sing famine, sing fire and flood.
Sing trees growing through the logging roads
through roofless houses and rusted plows
and lost sedans on the river bottoms
and houses burning
and the fields sown with salt.
Sing the bodies from the earth.
Sing themway up in the middle of the air.
Sing the saints, those used-car lot balloons.
Sing the elect, the silence in heaven.
Sing the end of all things, but sing.
Are you washed in the blood?
Sing.
This I give you, my children, and my children's children.
My city of dead, my butchers and my union-men.
Sing with the dirt in your mouth.
The hot song clotting your teeth
through your bitten tongue.
Which side are you on?
Not the blood, not the knife
not the door we enter in
hellmouth or heaven
not the river, not the ice
not eyes in the underbelly of the woods
not bloodbait or moonshine
no gun or safe or paper money
not ghost-thick road
not dogwood ridge
not furnace
but the song that does not end.
The miracle of your own survival
to live, and flower
chicory in the corn
spurge in the pavement
you steel-mill ivy, you tree on the ridge
you explosion of birds
in this charnal house
in this bone-fire
in this mouth
this blood
this flood
this dark
this river.
Sing.
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