A READING BY JOSHUA POTEAT

This first poem is "Burning Instead of Beauty," and it’s my only pro-organ donation poem.

In an autumn fog, it is easy to mistake a falling leaf for a sparrow,
           the simple brown of their backs: hollow-boned meadow.
A pale branch of seed in its beak, a string of feed corn.

Or, a stem so thin the air becomes the stem, and a beak
           would only mean that something is warm behind it,
and what good is that in autumn when the leaves
           become the little sisters of sparrows?

But think of the fog, how it must feel when it peels back
          from the valley only to find a leaf that is a sparrow,
a sparrow that is a leaf. Consider that, when the fog
          edges toward the sea, the sea is no longer itself.

It remains the valley, a part of the land.
           It becomes a field of white blossoms blown
from the tree of wind, from the trawler's nets,
           and as we walk the boiled lip of the beach
the fog thickens and we become less and less ourselves
           and for a moment we are lost among the waves,
among the leaves, and we've really gone nowhere
           but it feels like something has happened, that we've gone beyond
everything, that our bodies, fragile and alone,
           are finally where they need to be.

It's a false voyage, of course, because when the body
           is no longer ours, we take from it.

How dull and purple it is, raked clean, sponged and sewn.
          Sad even, in its own way, when it finally becomes just a body,
and we return to what reminds us of it.

Heart: oxen knee-deep in a canal.
          Tissue: blanket of silt, blanket of snow.
Lung: tracks of an otter through an oyster bed.
          Brain: monsoon . . . cello strings . . . the beginnings of songs.

None of this really brings us back to what we once knew,
          but we try, and in trying, there is decay.
When the body becomes a stem, a leafy dome of air,
          we crowd around our nothingness and stutter,
pretending we see the bird cages of our chests rise and fall,
          pretending that it is easy to go on without having
what we have always had. Easy because . . .

Easy because decay slowly begins with our body's beginning.

It is slow enough for my brother's body to be facedown
           in the pond, to remember the turtles napping on his back
as if he were a tiny whitened log bleached by the sun,
          the mosquitoes gathering up his fingers.

Slow enough to be 17 again, making love
           on the beach with a girl who would forget me
by autumn, a girl who could kiss the kiss of a paper bird,
           and the trawlers offshore flashing their spotlights
into the fog beyond the one-mile marker, the slight gleam
           of mackerel in their nets enough to make us grab the blanket
to cover up our bodies bright against the rising tide:
           the crumbled outline of a refugee's boat:
all four of our lungs breathing in as much as we can.

To remember which of my father's lungs was given
           to the man in Sweden who has almost lost his body,
the retinas sent by helicopter to Ohio for the child
          who will grow with pieces of my father in her.

Before we leave the body, the fog will cover us.
           We will bathe in its memory, facedown in the memory
of our beginning, our end, and every child in Ohio I meet
           from now on will be named Father
and I will see myself in them and I will love them,
           their dirty faces, their thin bodies warm and feathered,
fluttering in the breeze above the world while my father,
           empty, unknowing, keeps on giving himself away.

This poem, "Fahrenheit Meditation," is for my friends Adam and Emily Childs, who shared my first experience with the heat of an Arizona summer. The poem began, I suppose, as an innocent meditation on the obvious temperature of the Sonoran Desert and ended up as yet another elegy of sorts for my father, for my childhood, and for the south in general. It’s called "Fahrenheit Meditation."

Must it be this way, the air no longer wet, seamless,
            no longer ours, becoming the cicada's path
from night-blooming cereus to creosote,
                      the summer of moth larva rolling in the rice jar?

If so, let the heat rise over these desert mountains,
            rot-filled, and cover this city.
If so, begin with sadness, sadness,
                       because it is a good place to start,

because heat is a sadness of its own,
            though I cannot begin to define it,
except for that first awareness as a child,
                       that dim ache of the wrist, on a night like this,

years ago in a different south, the silent acknowledgment
            of a thing so spread out and weightless it becomes a landscape
of radio towers across the fields, red lights flickering
                       beyond the marsh's conspiratorial hum.

Ask me and I will tell you of the flowering tobacco leaves
            of my youth on fire in the night, lit by lightning,
the sweet wind pushing the flames
                       toward the tree-break and into the stables

where my father sat on a three-legged stool birthing a foal.
            To see night burning is to see God, or a minor version:
angelic palette, grub-white cataracts of summer.
                       To see Father is to see night long for the sea.

This is how we live within us,
            concubined to the land.
White peacocks aflame can sing the song
                       of flight, I think, of rain and June:

ash-plumed amniotic sac:
                                         manure shoveled into the cantaloupe rows.

Alexander the Great, after observing the depths
            of the ocean from a glass barrel said Sir Barons,
I have just seen that this whole world is lost,
                      and the great fish mercilessly devour the lesser.

Call me lesser then, I don't mind it.
                                   Call me lost.

This morning an airplane lifted over the city, the ghost
            of a pale child's toy, and left this desert behind.
A cactus wren danced mid-flight with a cicada,
                      danced, yes, but truth, too, and even a certain perfectness,

both catching the last breath of early light,
            both filled with a promise,
to not give in, to die in this air a truthful death,
                      in this land that should never have been ours.

The hunger of fire becomes a landscape of its own,
                                              an alternate world: to harvest, to harvest.

My father mutinied the mother mare
            and took the foal to the marsh, delicate like a kite,
and drowned her.
                      So what if the moon sang of its rising then?

I was courageous, wind-strong,
            I grew to fit that brackish air,
three-syllable morning
                      through the pines.

Later, he walked the fields with me in his arms,
            over the roasted copperheads, spun me
through that black sea, a smoke sail tied on
                      with handkerchief dabs. This would be our life.

Black: it hurt to look at it. Empty: I had to love it,
            and he held my wrist against a stalk blue as plum,
still smoldering, so I couldn't forget,
                      so that heat stayed with me forever.

"Hitchhiking in the Dying South" is loosely based on an accident I witnessed as a child, and it was all downhill after that.

I have seen the morning spread over the fields
            & I have walked on, trying to forget
how it seemed as if daybreak was founded
            on the most fragile web of breath,
& I had blown it.

            Then I thought it might not exist at all,
nor had it ever. That it was only the idea of breath
            & the egrets asleep in sour-grass were the idea
of flight, & if I was to breathe in,
            it would all just disappear.

I have seen the spotted toads at dusk
            come up from the ditches after a rainstorm
& into the asphalt's steam & I have seen them
            crushed by lumber trucks, then lifted away
into the pines by the gathering crows.

            I have felt the night quiver with heron's wing
over the swamps, over wild pigs in a blackberry patch,
            their snouts bloody & alive in the moonlight,
& I have walked on, dirty, alone, kicking to the grasses
            the swollen bodies of possum, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, bobcat,
giving them no prayer, no peace-filled silence.

            But that was long ago, when work was scarce
& meant thumbing my way to the tobacco plant
            or the slaughterhouse, north up Highway 17
to Holly Ridge or down to Bulltail on 210,
            either way I would be shoveling something until dusk,
something soft & warm & beyond me.
            And I would be glad for it.

Walking with that forgotten gesture wavering
            in the morning air, I felt that people
could come into the world in a place
            they could not at first even name,
& move through it finally, like the dawn,
            naming each thing until filled with a buoyancy,
a mist from the river's empty rooms.

            Thumb of autumn, thumb of locust, thumb of every kissed lip.

I have seen a cow die under the wheels
            of a Cadillac going 60, & who's to say
what the cow got from this?
            Some would say a dignity, perhaps,
past the slaughterhouse
            & the carcasses swimming the eaves.

            Or was it a punishment for nudging open
the gate-latch, the driver of the car
            in shock, mouthing cow, cow,
& the crows in the pines answering
            with the kind of sympathy my foreman used
when one of his line-workers
            cut off another finger in the shredder.
Son, at least you still got your arm.

            It's difficult to get this straight,
but there was a beauty to the sparks
            that spread out under the car, under the cow,
as they went from flesh to asphalt to flesh again:
            fireflies in the hollow of the hills:
a blanket of white petals from the tree of moon.

            A brief & miniature dawn began,
there on a summer night in the South
            I had come to love as part of myself,
the sparks clinging in the grass for a moment,
            unbearably bright, a confused moth nuzzling up
to the reflection of a flame shining in
            the cow's one open eye.

Now that I think of it, there was maybe even
            a beauty in the cow's fat, white body, a peace
I would never know, as it took in the car,
            lay down with it: calf soft: morning breath.

This peace had a body, it was caught up in the night,
            made from night, there on the shoulder of a road
so endless even the stars shrugged it off
& took the sparks as one of their own.

This next piece is "Our Memory, the Shining Leaves." There’s a certain kind of crazed beauty to Civil War reenactments. I love how serious the actors are. I think this should be how all wars are fought, by actors in costumes a hundred years after the fact.

From here it's hard to tell who's killing who
& I guess it's better this way,
not knowing the difference between the gray & the blue
& the stillness that answers each rifle shot with the only phrase
stillness can ever imagine itself saying:
at last we are here together.

It's an indulgent thought & that's why stillness never works.
It's too comfortable, too secure. I think you would agree
but I feel dumb asking because what good are questions
as the evening falls across our faces & the black oaks
at the edge of the field take on a pale yellow light
that the end of summer brings & the soldiers dying
their solemn deaths in front of us begin to believe
too much in themselves, in the blank crisp volley
of their voices: a decayed stone wall separating then & now.
It is to this that we should listen:
the space between the air & our bodies.

We don't belong here among the dead.
That is what they are, right? Trying to remember
is a kind of dying. Each pull of the trigger an elegy
for the body of a boy found by Union troops
in the ruined chimney of Gaines Mill,
for a photograph in a child's history book
of a field surgeon lunging with his amputating saw
at two dogs fighting over a canvas bag of opium.
How much simpler does it get?

Stillness says at last we are here but we shouldn't be.
You are too beautiful & I am too careless to want any of this.
The funnel cake, the candy apples, stove-pipe hats & horse-drawn carts
full of pumpkins & the brown cloth of dusk. The land rising slowly
into the pines, into the mountains, leaving the brittle grass lining the creek
& the town & the town's shadow behind in their silence: a silence
we're all used to, that we can't shake off & if we do, it's not us
that does the shaking. It's a cricket hopping from the grass to your knee,
the last day of summer & all we can do is wait for something to happen.
And it does. But never the way we want it.

Never the sudden sparrow there on your foot snipping the cricket
in two before it opens its big mouth. No, the cricket chirps & right there
summer unfolds & evening begins & you cup the poor dark song
in your hand & let it go.
It's not real a father says to his boy sitting on a bale of hay
behind us. They're not dying.
I look at him & know that for once in his life he is right.
The sad flinch that fathers give the world when their children
are shown too much or not enough makes him seem almost distant,
not wholly there, a part of the landscape & I begin to regret looking at him
as we regret anything that is crumbling right before us:
the ocean's shore: the shriek of the fox diffused by leaves.

It's too soon to know that flinch, though I have felt myself
holding it back at certain times. Not now, though, not here...
then you grab my hand, working each finger
into mine as if to say It's real, believe me.
Then maybe we should be here, if that's how it has to be, to prove
that we belong with the evening & the oaks & the dead gathering in piles
under the hay, with the boy who now has learned that death
is as comic & terrible as a sheep in a petting zoo,
the oily grit from its coat still there on his fingers,
a texture that stillness can never imagine.

The difference is that these soldiers eventually get up.
They brush the thistle & the straw from each other's backs,
not sure exactly of where they are for a moment,
& they walk away jingling their car keys & stretching their legs,
stiff from being dead so long: at last & together.
The difference is that the boy searches the field after the skirmish
looking for a trace of what he saw (gold button: hank of hair:
glass eye in a raven's mouth) & finds nothing but a hungry sparrow
lifting him into our memory, into the shining leaves.

We should be used to this sort of thing by now.
We should walk towards the white barn on the hill
where the lambs bite & snort at the children who get too close,
& forget about everything. Fold up the day into our sweaters,
hold each other closer than night or stillness can get.
And as the light carries us to the hill as though
we are flying into ourselves, shouldn't we finally,
after all of this, understand our lives?
Shouldn't we say what we meant to say?

"The Scenery of Farewell and Hello Again" is kind of my piece that implicates the reader, no matter what. I feel sorry about it, but sometimes you have to do it. "The Scenery of Farewell" is taken from Rilke’s German, loosely translated, and I just added "and Hello Again," although I never told anyone that.

In the asylum's cadaver room,
            a janitor holds his lantern in wonder
over a barrel of breasts cut from the month's dead.
            It cannot be like this, we gasp.
It doesn't work this way.
            If it helps: they were sick, insane.
O.K., I know, I know, it doesn't help.
            For now, try to forget the janitor, the barrel,
what grows around us, around our hearts.

As in: sit up straight.
                            As in: the whole, the aggregate.

The heart gets bigger as it dies,
            and I can feel it growing sometimes:
blue heron swelling above the river's tremble,
            pushing itself away from all it knows.
But for the heart's voice, the body would disappear
            into itself, shrinking like the flooded field
of horsetail reeds on this riverbank.

The heart's growth, I'm sure, has nothing to do with love,
                            or the body, which could be the same at times.

The same as the asylum across the river and its reflection
            in the eyeglasses of the janitor,
each desperate version needing the other so deeply
            that even the janitor looks away from the buildings
and back towards the river,
            already ashamed at what the body can do,
the shape of love nestled down, pushed into the reeds.

Tumor: lamb's ear: gray button of nipple:
                            barrel of Saint Agnes: Agnes in the trees.

How can we speak?
            This is how we make something ours.
We stare at it until it becomes us and we walk away
            with a fist-sized lump in our pocket,
humming a sad tune in case someone passing by
            thinks we're happy. And we are.

What is removed drops horribly into a pail.
                            So we don't forget.

He wrapped it in a handkerchief. We wrapped it.
            Try not to blame the heart.
It is soft and is filled with us,
            the filaments of cherry blossom, silent cathode.
The heart exists to grow, and to take a breast from the barrel
            would mean treason of the body.
How can we speak of it?
This is the conversation we didn't want to have.
                            Of course it has to do with love.

The body, however, can only go so far until it wears down,
            until we're left with the janitor, faceless in his overalls,
his hands alive with touching a softness that is completely new
            and our hands beginning to memorize that softness.

Knowing this won't help much.
           We want a face, a guilty look over a shoulder.
The foxglove, the cornflower,

                            the sky from the river's long road.

We want a scene, a place that remains real,
            despite all this sad-getting-in-the-way-of.
The asylum, its awnings loose and ruined
            in the wind, the patients dressing the radiators
with soiled gowns. No, not that one.
            The heart can confuse. A field of reeds, then,
a sycamore, the janitor undressing on the riverbank.
            Yes, that will do. Stare at it.
Forget everything that grows around it.

If it's possible, and I'm not sure if it is.
                            Thorn grove of the blind: handsome lamb: harvest this day.

The heart knows nothing of this place,
            walking beyond the asylum's gates
and through the mist of poplar seeds,
            fluff and hilum, a heron's nest
in the tallest limbs,
            but it's not a question of knowing
the landscape and what hovers in it,
            of how it disappears into the horizon.
It's how a sycamore glowing in the twilight
            beside a barn becomes ours now
by simply being there, existing.

We no longer have to stare. It is ours as we swim
            in darkness to a lighted boat across the river,
the breast slipping from our pocket,
            from the handkerchief's blossom
and the crawfish gathering in the bottom's current
            are at first amazed with the white oval of flesh,
halo of the above, until it dissolves,

                            becomes nothing and the river remains.

The river is something we do not want to know.
            The difference between a heron flying low
in the distance over a marsh
            and a heron mangled by wild dogs at your feet:
it is the inner workings we avoid,
            that chart of wing and eye that reveals
what we've always feared,
and where we find ourselves
            won't be much of a surprise, coming up for air,
the faint metallic taste of silt,
                            of autumn in our mouths.

Let the heron remain blue in the evening air
            and widen over us.
Let the sycamore wait with our new white overalls
            hanging on the nails in its bark,
frozen in the half light of time, of farewells.

Let the river bring us to the boat
            as if we never entered it, our wrinkled hands
dry and strange, our lover lying naked
            in the bow under a lantern,
eager for the promised gift,
            the heart-shaped face of mutiny,

saying Hello, it's good to see you again.

This next one, "Self-Portrait as a Mourning Dove," is another desert poem, I guess. The landscape there is really amazing around Tucson and the Sonoran Desert. I had a lot of words come out of the time I spent there, and this is a tiny bit of it.

On the side of a desert road
                                    a headless dove,
            its body a basket of ants,
                        basket of creosote stems.

To live at all is to grieve
                                    and from what life
            did we gain this trust,
                        awake each dawn

to find the bright air
                                    full again,
            rustle and coo
                        in the widening palms?

This last piece is based on a story my father told often. I think he did that to give me some sort of courage or balls or something more that I didn’t already have. On the record, no one has ever asked or called me Little Bo Peep. This is called "The Stigmata Rather than a Punch on the Nose."

If you'd asked my father when he was nine
why he beat up a kid for calling him Little Bo Peep

he would have beat you up too. Not because
you would ask in that superior way you always do

but because he couldn't understand the difference
between hate and pain and for that he'd sock you one.

It had nothing to do with being a bonnet-headed
shepherdess forever afraid of wolves or communists

hiding in the chicken-coop, forever coming home
empty-handed. It was the destruction

of the one word he knew better
than any other that got to him.

Imagine: 1952, summer, an over-ripe pear
in each pocket, furiously defending his name

and his nose and no sheep in sight
down the sweet-leaf rows, no relief

for the wretched in Maysville, N.C.
He tried to picture himself leaving town

on the sorrel's dewed back, early morning,
the long-throated birds asleep in the sourgrass

and the sorrel wading into the horizon,
but all he could think of was a wonderful scene

in a movie and as always would become a spectator
of his own life. You would have thought

that the other boys (Marion and Steamboat and the rest),
shirt-tails open in the wind, would let up,

forget about it. They kept coming,
waiting for him on the back road beneath the willows.

Their fascination with seeing blood pour from a nose,
even their own, became not just blood

but the reconstruction of it.
Not love, but the forgetting:

a yellowed calm breaking over the leaves
and their faces as dusk did then.

This was not dusk or locust though.
It was the yellow that memory

brings to a place, carrying a kerosene lantern
lit for a boy stuck on the roof

of a grain silo, too afraid to climb down in the dark.
The yellow my father saw in his fists

as he would light up one boy after another
like a cupped match, making whoever it was pay

for the blood of his good name.
Little Bo Peep. Poteat.

It was a simple mistake to make,
but what does reason have to do with instinct,

with a stain on a boy's palm, the sow in her trough
bleeding out of her eyes for want of darkness

or rather a light luminous enough to see
the pear trees at the rim of the meadow

one last time? The sick sow he fed mornings,
combing the lice from her brow,

speaking his own name as a question to her. Poteat?
Our ruins follow us, that much he told me,

later, after our good-byes and our kind sirs
quickened in the clay, red at the heart of it,

the deepest well of it, the sow that rubbed
her ears raw on a fence post, long gone by then.

Calm yourself. Give in.
And that is where you find him, in the fields,

a muslin of rain delivering the ancient scent
of tobacco. Where else would he be?

Born in a field at the edge of a ditch he would tell her.
This is a story without surprises.

The formality of a swallow's nest falling
from the ruined rafters of a silo didn't confuse

or sadden him, he just didn't want it anymore:
the dying becoming dead, and the dear old summer

washed up on the river's bank,
dear sweet summer.

The stupid pig lying there. Fuck you. Fuck you.
You don't know him at all.