Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting (4 page)

In the Ruins of the Ironworks

We had been looking for a sign and there it was:

the faded copper explaining that the iron of this place

was once known throughout

the South;

the nails, the pins, the wire; the things with which

to make machines; gleaming

instruments to single-row plow

the earth.

And past the sign: into the faint greased lubricant

smell of the foundry; into the crumbling

buildings,

where men once turned black from the smoke

that escaped the flues and made their bodies be

striped with soot

and sweat

as they smelted ingots, black and hot as the air

that rattled in their lungs

to give us

industry.

If, even past these remnants, we could see

the hill and the quarried stone where they perched

two cannons overlooking

the low river,

and the rocks, graffiti-covered and vast,

perhaps we truly would be told

that Michael still loves

Lou-Anne,

even if it was for only one night, with black

enamel spray paint in the heat

of a July evening

that they stroked and burned through

in '83.

Songs in Planck Time

I rank first among all things

the new pine board

  

my father and I nailed

into the half-collapsing dock

  

that lurched out back then

when I was young

  

into the brackish end of the Mattaponi.

I seem to recall something obvious

  

about the way that one board

was devoid of natural qualities, was

  

out of place and undeveloped in time, was

as yet unweathered as was I, the reverse

  

of which is mere endurance, an impotent

going on; so add it to the list

  

of things that I am not, if something must

be done with it:

  

not the prince of any

even minor island. Not

  

and won't be the hero of anybody's story

but my own, if that. Not

  

the ripple moving outward, not

the flat of the oar that slapped the water,

  

not the sound it made that drove

every bird from every branch at once, not

  

the sky they darkened with

their flight. Not

  

my memory of you still on that long

walk to the end of the dock,

  

jumping over every missing timber

as if it might make a bit of difference when

  

you spread out your arms and paused, then

finally fell into the water. Not

  

even briefly any father's son, not any

song we haven't heard before.

The Abhorrence of Coincidence

Look, out there

that goddamn lame horse

kicks up just the most recent of

the newly dusted snow,

  

which forms into a pattern,

a small ellipsis underneath

the lightning-split dogwood tree

you tried to mend

with wood glue, bandages,

and a spool of rusty bailing wire,

  

the end result of which

was nothing more than a dead tree

adorned with the trappings

of some god-awful human injury.

  

You are out back by the barn now,

hammering nails into

eighty dollars' worth of shoes

for that damn horse

you said we shouldn't kill,

  

and I tap my finger on the window,

and see myself mirrored in

the nails you drove already,

and in the manner of the impertinent roan

who ran in circles in the snow

this afternoon and made

the dirt turn up, who turned

the snow a little brown, the one

you always lectured me about

never trying to ride.

  

I remember when we had

no horse, no pasture

in which it could trample earth

into a name, or if not a name

something that would instigate

my thinking on the time

I said your name

  

over and over again

as if it might be made

into a kind of destiny,

a destiny of saying, and being

said, and by me, as if

a pale ellipsis could of its own accord

resist its being covered

by a lame horse turning up

the dirt a little more,

  

and so I write your name now

in the breath I've left against

the glass, the need for tapping

gone, the surprise long passed

from your saying in the night

not names but something else,

not destiny but,
Hell, if I was anywhere

but here I'd be just as much in love

with someone else,

  

and so I breathe again

and cover up

your name,

for I am not anywhere,

and I am not else.

While Trying to Make an Arrowhead in the Fashion of the Mattaponi Indians

We are born to be makers of crude tools.

And our speech is full of cruel

signifiers: you, me, them, us. I

am sure we will not survive.

  

No. I am only certain that the

pine trees that ring this lake in Virginia

are occasional, that I sit between them

at the water's edge,

  

cast two stones against

each other and rest.

For we go down

through these

terrible hours

together.

Four

The Locks of the James

History isn't over, in spite of our desire

for it to be. Even now, one can see

the windfall of leaves gathering

like lost baggage on the dirty pathways

paralleling the old canal, itself resurrected

in an attempt to reproduce a minor economic miracle

that had taken place in a similarly middling city

halfway across this continent. I walked the route

with my father on the day of its opening,

before the new commercial ventures gained

brief fame and the shops and music halls,

the apartments in the husks of once burnt

tobacco warehouses collectively became

the place to be. He pointed out the sheer scale

of the endeavor, the countless men it took to dig

the channels, the drivers of the boats, the ingenuity

of fixing all the mechanisms in place without

the aid of welding. A scale model of the working locks

could be operated by inserting a penny in a slot.

Two doors shut, the lower chamber filled

with water, ostensibly bringing a ship

laden with goods to the level of the next

enclosure, where it could, by all accounts,

navigate the waters beyond the fall line

out even to Ohio, with luck, beyond

the Mississippi. I only later learned

the scale model of the locks I'd played with

was the only working set the river had ever known,

the actual project having run into financial troubles,

driven into the ground by every brand

of huckster and charlatan one could imagine,

not to mention the fact that the railroads

had already made ten thousand men's lifework

obsolete. And I wonder if I should be angry

that my father never mentioned this, that instead

of acknowledging the fact that this project had failed,

had been utterly doomed from the start, he'd made

a big production over the model boat that had gone

missing from the little plastic locks. What would he

have told me, as we sat carving newer, better boats

from peels of silver birch bark? What would he

have said as we watched the water raise them

and the doors to all that was beyond opened triumphantly

and we walked the three or four steps to the end

of the display, then started over? Anger

seems absurd, but so too does this effort

to recollect, to reconstruct a moment from my life

in miniature, knowing that a scale model can accomplish

nothing when the life-sized thing was never built,

knowing that everything in the world only reminds me

of something else. The last time I went

the whole lot of it had been abandoned, more or less.

A few bums hadn't gotten the message

that the civic venture was a failure, one or two

unremarkable concerts had occurred, a couple of yuppies

were still rumored to be living, all alone, in the penthouse

apartment of a renovated tobacco warehouse, there was

a stink about a parking lot that had been laid

over a slave burial ground. Nevertheless,

the sun was bright in the sky and the bums

dangled their fingertips in the canal's green water,

and apparently some landlord was still paying

to have the grass kept green and mowed.

My father had been buried not far

from there. No one sang at his wake.

The absence seemed improper, deep in misery or not,

like it was just as well for us to see song

buried with him. I passed the statue

of Christopher Newport as I left, as I had

that day with my father. I can't recall

feeling any different, though I probably did,

having learned in the intervening period that besides

being an accidental founder of this city, he was also

a pirate and a murderer of indigenous peoples.

If I'm honest, I don't think I cared.

If I'm honest, mine is the only history

that really interests me, which is unfortunate,

because I am not alone.

Church Hill

Watch how the drivers on the hill

make a blinking semaphore

of hazard lights, car horns and the idle

movement of their engines,

and pause beside the church

that gave the hill its name,

from which you once could see

the river and a city built

at a bend which reminded

some back then of another

on the Thames. So much

is made of likenesses.

  

Now a parade of candles held aloft are cupped

with a reverence for the melted wax

as the candles disappear to nubs.

There is an earnestness of being there

that I can't understand.

 

Some say only vigils are alarming now;

each cause for grief becomes

a public play, improving on the passé

tragedy of dirt. If you undress

the earth right here, attempt

to excavate the hill, you will find

that every human wish

is buried there, underneath

the Georgian houses, under too

the veneer of asphalt

that hides a catalog of graves

the paraders somehow still recall,

perhaps with a sense

that there is imperfection

in anything that's made,

or that the alleged ghosts

are all that remain

of an abandoned field hospital,

where now there is a sketchy park

with a seesaw and a too-loose set

of monkey bars, where once

there was a pile of discarded limbs

stacked to the exact height at which

they could hold themselves aloft.

An entire train was later buried

underneath the hill. A tunnel,

poorly built, collapsed. At some point

everyone stopped trying

to dig the survivors out and went back

to whatever it was they'd done before,

despite the fact that witnesses attest

to having heard, for days after,

a muffled noise that seemed

to mimic human speech,

and later still, the quiet ringing

of the Pullman's bell.

Everything's exhausting.

No one should be blamed for this.

  

The parade is over anyway.

All that's left of whatever grief there was

is the splotchy wax of melted candles,

some plastic cups tossed into a gutter,

a line of cars disappearing into other

darknesses, the echo in the church

of the reenacted speech that Patrick Henry gave

making a nation out of violence.

If I remember right the church bell rang.

Everything was silent

to the west.

Nominally

Every beginning is just a course correction,

the loosest string of the as yet untangled knot, the last

thought not yet lost and so worth playing out

as I wait for some new sadness to begin.

As in, down in the valley where I'm from there is

a parking lot, which covers up a grave,

a name we give in singular for the hundred slaves

they buried there back then. And I am unmoved by the cold

cardinality of this, and all the marks the waves

wore into the outer walls of factories

when the last flash flood that briefly threatened us

came through in '98. I stand beneath the interstate

as it rumbles overhead and disappears.

There were some names here once.

Some children, too. So what? Nothing

was counted. Order is a myth.

Corona

Four p.m., Late Empire, the historians will write,

the child on the banks of the James

creating a kingdom in his mind

first brings tyranny into the realm

at the end of a kite string, tugging

it this way and that, disinterestedly,

until the kite moving across the sky

becomes a symbol of abjection,

a disgrace, and is hated by the kingdom's

living god and only subject. In none

of the many volumes written in the boy king's honor

do they mention the ball of infant snakes

that startled him by drifting out from under

the log on which he stood, causing him

to let loose the string of the kite, but then again,

neither do they tell of the great fire that began

a hundred and fifty years before in a tobacco warehouse

across from where he stood and spread

to every corner of the city until the glow

of the remaining embers was seen

as an ominous beacon by the rebel lookouts on Spy Rock,

a point two hundred miles or more to the west

in the Appalachian Mountains. Shrug,

if you must; history is made of such omissions.

If we had paid more attention

we would not know more. If we were distracted

in the middle kingdom by a cloud

passing over the sun, obscuring

our view of the kite and the city skyline,

now rebuilt, as was the king in his regal isolation,

it would be understood as a natural failing,

one that would perhaps imbue our lives

with greater meaning, but it would not be true.

We would not know how the boy king,

years later, without heirs, would consider

his reign a failure, for how brief it was, an hour,

at best an afternoon, at worst the time it took

for that cloud to pass and dissipate, and he

would watch himself walk down the cobblestone streets,

the lamps forever gaslit, the footpaths of his life

as yet unweathered by the soles of his imagined subjects'

feet, nor by the pair of egrets who flapped their wings above

the river, nor by the long carp swimming out where it became

a brackish estuary, nor by the kite

flown off into the unverifiable distances.