Home
Face down in the dirt yard,
head gashed from a stumble—
he climbed up from the ground, stank and drunk, urine
to the knee, and asked if Aunt Ida poured out
his stash.
If she had, he might have vanished, but the whiskey
was where he left it: shoved through a hole
in the box spring.
It was a fog swept morning—water limp leaves
scattered
on the street—he swayed in the flung rain and loosened
the lid, swigged the heady
bourbon down, then with a thick
sigh hazing his face sent the warming drink into his
belly.
Two weeks he was out,
shouting in dive watering
holes shooting stick five
dollars a rack, making
attempts at
necking any raspy voiced booze hag
he stumbled into—now, lint pocketed, out on
the trailer porch,
blood-hardened ear, blood-caked hair,
sour-mash between
his legs—his mumbling head, black greasy nest of hair
falling in his
face.
Listening to Lady Day
The woman in the Larry Levis
poem, that gardenia, that voice whose face had
been written
about by other poets, Ruined,
they called it, that face,
that voice sung with slight hum, a reverie she would have
performed
in the smokiest spot-light—
a woman who could sound
weeping into words.
Solitude she called: spring,
bloom, early evening daydream,
a lover gone, the permanence
of memory until her lover returned—an affair she
sang a story to,
her a voice, raspy, wet with
whiskey.
There are photos: her lips,
her teeth, muted—photos of her clinching into a
microphone,
one eye shut, the other a
glazed twinkle—it must have been a man’s suit jacket
she draped over her shoulder,
leaving one arm bare softly
lit in what looks to be a photo taken in a booth the
two lovers could have ambled into
on a spring or autumn night.
No, I got it wrong—she sang
for the tips, and might have tucked her folded
money somewhere
in that shoulderless lounge
number she always seemed to be wearing. And she
didn’t sing of an affair
or a man, but of a brothel
where affairs are acted out with whispers and
promises, before and after sex,
and sometimes by
appointment.
Ruined, no
other word for it,
no other face, no song she
sang to make it so, for it wasn’t a song, it was a
moan, a brothel noise,
a pitiless echo of the
ruined.
That echo. That fruit.
She must have known, years
later, dying in a hospital was the same as dying in a
brothel.
The same lynching. The same
rope.
Portrait of a Latina Working the Sidewalk
It wasn’t how I pictured it,
hag-looking mamas,
clacking their heels, the
occasional twirl of the purse,
hands resting on their hips,
all of them lined up the street—
made-up mamas hair sprayed
all sideways, goosing
crotches, pitching a tug.
No, she was in her early
twenties and on her way out
of a bar, wearing a black-
lace number, and unlike most
nights—
usually walking
with a pink-faced man, her
arms wrapped around his waist,
thumb, maybe, hooked in a
belt-loop—she was alone,
drunk, bangs falling in her
face.
Her night off to stagger
the sidewalk alone,
rubber-necked, slurring out one-
liners, ready to turn a
trick.
It is not the humming
nostrils, tinkle of a belt,
a lonesome ache—remnants
of a whiskey night—
not her ticket to romantic places,
alleys, beside a dumpster,
lips shiny as butter, this habit
that sent her wandering for
a companion,
a daddy she’d
lay eyes on, jump-start and
dazzle,
twirl and trick.
Portrait of Randolph on
Fire
All I could do was watch
until his half-
whimper of fear
came to breath. Too drunk to
know how his legs
began roaring to blackness,
he could not find his face
in the succession,
the
utterance, not words—
a scream, a dance—the
succession, running
in place, slapping
his thighs, gasoline britches,
bursting near the chicken
coop.
The yard birds ruffled and
clucked,
white plumes drifting in air—
snow and flame and
screaming—
the undazzle of fire.
