Poetry

Mary and Mary and Salome 
encountered a young man 
who told them he was alive 
but they were scared 
and didn't tell anyone.

Or they came and told
Peter and the rest of us.
Or maybe he appeared 
only to Mary Magdalene, 
still smelling of sweet perfume 
and she came and told all of us 
as we were mourning, 
trying to make sense 
of a huge new absence 
at the center of our lives.

Accounts vary.

If she came, we didn't believe her.
We had seen him die.
We know what death is.

Of course, if the three women 
just ran away, scared,
then how do I know all of this?
Where do I even find the voice 
to tell you this story?
My syllables are just a scribbler's 
cynical trick, a metafiction.

So he must have come to us 
when we were eating, scolding us 
because we know what death is.
He said some hard words.
Those who keep believing 
in death will be condemned.
Those who don't can drink 
poison and play with snakes.
He said we would speak 
in strange tongues.

Luke remembers it differently.
He showed us his hands and feet.
He ate fish with us.
Luke recalls soft talk of forgiveness, 
raised hands, blessings.

But I remember something harder 
and stranger-judgment
and an otherworldliness in his eyes.

I don't even remember the trip to Bethany 
though Luke swears we walked.
I just remember that he was gone again.

But somehow this second loss, 
this absence after impossible presence, 
was different, compelling us to go, 
to tell people, to shape words 
that helped others stop, 
stand up straight,
and lay their sicknesses aside.

I bend to kiss my mother goodbye.
"Are you going back to work?" she says.
"I'm going home," I answer.
"Work?" she says. "No, home."
"Work?" "Home." "Work?" "Home" "Work?" "Home."
She finally just shrugs, as if home 
were a ridiculous place to go at 7:15 
in the coming dark of a cool evening
in the middle of October.

Driving west, I watch the last vestiges
of pink and orange slip into nothing.
I try to visualize my mother's brain,
filled with blood 18 months ago,
now struggling to make connections.

Is it the size of an egg in the chicken house? 
or of a walnut fallen in the front yard 
of the house in Claysville, Alabama, 
where her family sharecropped— 
the happiest days of her life,
she once told me, months before the morning 
when she came to breakfast and asked me 
if I had found the sheets in the bathroom?
I had already fetched the towels from the dryer 
and managed to let her know this.

In the car, my daughter, wide-eyed, said,
"Daddy, she said, 'sidelake.’”  I know, 
I said, driving away, taking her to a swim meet 
and a graduation party and then home, 
only to return the next evening
to pick my mother up off the bathroom floor, 
dress her, and take her to the ER.

Are the neurons a frayed network 
where the ends don't quite meet?
A sixty-year-old Star Flower quilt 
with the stuffing exposed?
A dress worn too many Sundays?
A coat that has seen 
too many winters, stretched thin 
in the interest of shoes, books, corn?

What does it feel like to hear the words 
leave her mouth, different from the words 
in her egg-shaped or walnut-sized mind?
To have this fool just keep repeating "home,"
as if that were a place one could go.

Is it like trying to communicate 
with a 20-year-old son who knows it all, 
who just comes home on weekends to eat 
wash clothes, show off his newfound 
college ideas, use words like "social constructs,"
"hegemony," "deconstruction," "Derrida"?
This son, who is always already driving away.

Red apples are like red apples.
Can you see it when you close your eyes? 
And tell me, what’s that like?
I can see the word, recall the fleshy bite 
in the white kitchen my mother had just cleaned.
Can you see the red of the Red Delicious?

When the teacher told me to close my eyes and imagine
I could see the blackboard of my mind: fogged out,
chalky residue, static cling. Blackboards 
when I stared straight ahead. Blackboards 
when I closed my eyes. A small world, 
my imagination boarded up. 
No light in the closet.

Aphantasia, a voided mind, starless 
as the Mariana Trench.

I desperately clung to sounds, to words, 
to the thicket of a word like trench. 
How it traps you between its teeth. 
So apples became ideas, then beliefs
skinned in a story I wrote faster
than I could speak. 

But what about the apples? 

I go back to the kitchen, my mother telling me 
to be careful carving thin slices with a dull butter knife, 
dinner simmering before dad’s home. It all happened, 
so I can tell you about the waxy skin,
the red darkened like a shadow, a picture 
as good as it gets.

            for Aimé Césaire

Aimé, why these poems, not mere ferrements, but
ringworm, bedbugs, searing leeches lodged

within our skin! Even with razors as claws,
never enough scratch, this itch, Aimé.

Marronant, beneath lynched sun, stoned by asteroids,
we bathe in blood from the slashed tongues of stars.

Gently, we swallow one another
baptized by the magma of our throats.

The clash of our teeth sparks as our bodies
conjure amrita blessed to plant as seed aimé.

Those were the longest nights of summer—
the small-town airplane hanger 
used only for two-props spraying poison over 
corn and wheat and us until November.

A new pilot, eighteen-year-old learner’s permit,
he sailed endless Kansas sky, much farther
than the fields barren of timber:
unclouded eyes and thoughtless, an explorer.

At sixteen, I’d never been kissed, his neighbor,
then I dissolved under his hands, darkness no longer
as our mouths crimped together like pie crusts in the larder.
Paula Abdul sang “I Need You,” and I wanted no other. 

Too young to date, I asked permission of my mother,
who loved him because of my dead brother, 
born a week apart from him and us in October.
His mother, weeping, walked the ER corridor to see her. 

We’d fly over the fields, through the ether.
What youthful evening could be finer? 
Our small lives filled fully, kernels of grain: our hunger 
for more life beyond this and one another.

We’d land, then lie in his Dodge Caravan, naked upon the leather,
mapping our fragile ankles, spines, and necks with tender
kisses and the hands so grasping but still lighter 
than the air, the plane, the summer.

He left in fall for college to become a preacher.
I write him a long, then longer letter.
I wait until October, crying harder.
I drive out once to the hangar.  Nothing hovers.