He did it deliberately &

so when the police tracked him down he was

able to explain it so

clearly they had to

agree. Still, they hadn’t done it.

Anyway, he’d checked it out &

it was what they’d suspected,

women! – women just

opened & spilled, there was

nothing special in there after all.

It can happen anytime.

A cut simply closes. The edges

join like two spills.

Cramped up in hiding

the felon watches his gut wound

out of his keenest eyes.

How did it get in?

                                    All the ransacked

rooms never shocked any

householder more. But it heals

like drawers that pull themselves back

in, fold and straighten their layers out

smooth and seed the wet new

jewelry in between:

strings, clusters, studded clasps.

So the rich man

will handle the skin of the rich wife again.

She got out of me

a new body, and nicer;

when her fists open up

her hands show luckier lines

and she is no woman.

She’s got my death in her life,

cross, gossiping oaks,

but that is not what I hate:

she’ll die, you trees will, we can

wring stones’ throats too, if we want. It’s that

now she’s growing, she doubles and triples herself

while in me eggs only

gather my blood

and pinch out one by one

to be somebody else or nothing.

Bristling outward

his sadism roots him deepest.

Some will hurt whomever they choose.

God-headed and radiant

            but shimmering little to offer.

Don’t build your bed of crisis

            or lie on the down of his ire.

Aware that sudden fires,

like clouds come often at night,

I move to undo your thigh

and absent years dwindle

                                    like cinders above the water.

But small birds

slip from branches at the salvo,

                                    waiting for the sky to fall.

v. THE BLOODY HUSK-MAT BED

As a boy I created wounded men in fields behind the house,

dragging them to safety beneath the sumac mounds.

I made mud to set broken limbs and held bleeding hands.

And when I grew older, I found a mourning dove

fallen from its nest too early. Careful not to move it,

I forced worm’s meat inside its beak.
In the night I heard danger and walked barefoot to the yard,

searching sightless till I felt my own sick weight

displace that feathered vault of heaven.

And I fell to the grass – a doctor undone

sitting cross-legged in wretchedness.

And so with the last of my birthday cash

I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.

The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror

and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)

as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.

I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed

the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words

I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel

their cocks, cripple their families and pets.

The kit came and of course was crap.

It can’t make much difference

to the murdered’s house

that this tenant left to the sound of sirens

instead of farewells and nostalgic songs,

that there was no room for books

or chairs in his moving van.

It can’t make much difference either

that he left before his lease was up.

Straight out of Grapes of Wrath, wrought from God

knows how many dead Fords, the chicken truck

sputters in the slow lane toward Chicago,

its teetering stacks of wire crates packed

with proto-cutlets, Kentucky-Fried-to-be.
Clouds of down and dander billow behind

like a slumber party gone haywire.

As I pass doing eighty it’s impossible

to discern birds: the swaying wall of white

is continuous as milk, unbroken

by any singular wing or beak. The hungry city

sharpens its long, unanimous knife.

A prairie gust shoves the chicken truck

smack into my lane. I veer, re-veer,

and my own sullen cargo opens its black eyes

like two empty cupboards, then closes them again.

Spring of 1954, my mother stood at the threshold of Henry Picotte’s abandoned chicken house, a bouquet of hens dangling in either hand, and eyed the enormous prairie rattler coiled on the dirt floor. Killing the snake would be inconvenient, hampered as she was by a midterm pregnancy and the hysterical chickens swooping left and right around their new hoe, but a weapon would not have been hard to find. Stout diamond willow sticks leaned against every gatepost on the place, anywhere a man might step off a horse. Such readiness suggested an extended family of snakes, more than she wished to dwell on with her hands full of squawking chickens. Stepping back out, she hollered for my father to bring a spade.

It’s true what they say about the rural school experience—the ranch kids who attended one-room country schools saw both the best of education and the worst it could offer. At best, we received one-on-one attention, with every assignment marked and returned to us to be corrected; spelling bees, learning games and elaborate Christmas programs; and of course we had the advantage of all grades in one room—this last lending the effect of having lessons presented subliminally for a year or two before being called upon to master them yourself. At worst, we had chaos. A school taught by only one teacher is bound to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of that teacher, and indeed, if the weaknesses were of the sort that encouraged rebellion and disorder, then students were in for a long year.

I made a good job of the window. I swung until only jagged shards stuck up from the glazing, then pounded at those with the side of my hand to knock them out. Once it was started, I saw it through, every punch a jolt of electricity that charged the next blow and the next. When it was over I stood still for a while, trying to sort one version of reality from another, as though I had turned a corner and come upon a terrible wreck only to recognize myself amid the blood and broken glass.