Home Soil
I caught on to Korea, McCarthy, Vietnam
early. Different wars. One country. Divided
the way I was divided, made the Bull Run
and Manassas of domestic bliss. Either
I was "every bit Daddy" or "just like Mamma,"
nothing, if not dangerous. In countries where
everyone looks alike, the enemy is not discernible.
Even kids and grannies are known hand-grenade carriers.
That's why they have pockets in their pinafores. And
wear coolie hats. They run in circles, amoral, loyal.
Logic gets them coming and going. The very sight
can break your heart or knock you dead. Best
both sides should waste them, ambush them
leaning elbows on sunshine and leaf shadows
dappling kitchen counters, eating cinnamon toast,
watching the Hearings with colored Mamma May.
The day the lawyer, any grown-up, dared say,
"Sir, have you no decency?" tears shot out of me.
The old black woman held me in her arms,
crooning, secret with hymns, until dinner.
Old soldiers fade away in Florida citrus groves
on their 38th parallel, leaving their battleground
buckled with winter and land-mines, swollen with want.
Mamma could murder my Jesus-Christ jaw-line,
Daddy-blue eyes, and yellow hair, all that smacks
of her mate, and Daddy dies to wring Mamma's mouth,
the too-effusive Methodist warmth, the lower lip
full of injury and dawdle, the way I tell tales
as if I had all day in an aluminum glider.
Christians, I'm your offering, dressed for the jungle
in pink bow-ribbons and pinafores, zigzagging
through the fire of your M-16s like an enemy guerrilla.
I should stand still and let you kill each other.
How many of us holding hands, swaying on the wind
in Alabama, boiled on the spray of fire hoses, singing
"We Shall Overcome" in Washington with daffodils
for bayonets, sure as shooting of the balm
in Gilead, were also crooning, secret with hymns,
for someone earlier than ourselves?
Saving Memory
Summer nights we put pennies on the track.
Even the station was quiet enough for crickets.
Mountains surrounded us, middling high and purple.
No matter were we stood they protected us
with perspective. People call them gentle mountains
but you can die in there; they're thick
with creeper and laurel. Like voodoo,
I drew pictures with a sparkler. A curved line
arced across the night. Rooted in its slope,
one laurel tree big as the mountain holding it.
You can hear the train in the rails.
They're round, not flat, as you'd expect,
and slick. We'd walk the sound, one step, two, slip,
on purpose, in the ballast, hopscotch
and waltz on the ties, watching the big, round eye
enter the curve and grow like God out of the purple,
the tracks turning mean, molten silver blazing
dead at us. We'd hula. Tango. And the first
white plume would shoot up screaming long, lonely,
vain as Mamma shooing starlings from her latticed pies.
Sing Mickey Mouse, the second scream rising long, again,
up and up. Stick our right hip out, the third
wailing. Give it a hot-cha hot-cha wiggle, the fourth
surrounding us. Wrists to foreheads, bid each other fond
adieus, count three,turn our backs and flash it a moon,
materializing, fantastic, run over with light,
the train shrieking to pieces, scared, meaning it,
short, short, short, short, pushing a noise
bigger than the valley. It sent us flying,
flattened, light as ideas, back on the platform,
the Y6B Mallet compound rolling through
southbound, steamborne, out of Roanoke.
It wasn't to make the train jump the track
but to hold the breath-edged piece of copper
grown hot with dying, thin with birth,
wiped smooth of origin and homilies.
To hold such power. As big as the eye
of the train, as big as the moon burning
like the sun. All the perspective curved,
curved and gone.
Making Breakfast
There's this ritual, like a charm,
Southern women do after their men
make love to them in the morning.
We rush to the kitchen. As if possessed.
Make one of those big breakfasts
from the old days. To say thank you.
When we know we shouldn't. Understanding
the act smacks of Massah, looks shuffly as
all getout, adds to his belly, which is bad
for his back, and will probably give him
cancer, cardiac arrest, and a stroke. So,
you do have to wonder these days as you
get out the fat-back, knead the dough,
adjust the flame for a slow boil,
flick water on the cast-iron skillet
to check if it's ready and the kitchen
gets steamy and close and smelling
to high heaven, if this isn't an act
of aggressive hostility and/or a symptom
of regressed tractability. Although
on the days we don't I am careful
about broiling his meats instead of
deep-fat frying them for a couple of hours,
dipped in flour, serving them smothered
in cream gravy made from the drippings,
and, in fact, I won't even do
that anymore period, no matter what
he does to deserve it, and, besides, we are
going on eighteen years so it's not as if we
eat breakfast as often as we used to,
and when we do I now should serve him—
forget the politics of who serves whom—
oatmeal after? But if this drive answers
to days when death, like woolly mammoths
and Visigoth hordes and rebellious kinsmen,
waited outside us, then it's healthy, if
primitive, to cook Southern. Consider it
an extra precaution. I look at his face,
that weak-kneed, that buffalo-eyed,
Samson-after-his-haircut face, all of him
burnished with grits and sausage
and fried apples and biscuits and my
power, and adrift outside himself,
and the sight makes me feel all over
again like what I thank him for
except bigger, slower, lasting, as if,
hog-tied, the hunk of him were risen
with the splotchy butterfly on my chest,
which, contrary to medical opinion, does not
fade but lifts off into the atmosphere,
coupling, going on ahead.
The Promised Land
When my poems are published, there they are,
out there, on slick paper, on newstand's, people's
coffee tables, and they look like
they have my genes. That's
my bony butt, my spineless face!
I could die. They need
correction, those no-good, lousy, dirty-rotten,
good-for-nothings, think they're such big shots,
that disgusting, nauseating load,
and they're like dead things. They have
no connection with me. They need to be
wiped off the face of the earth. And I get it, finally, how
my mother and father could look at
four blond, blue-eyed children
and want to murder them, how, seeing only good
residing in oneself, it is possible to look at
what one gives birth to and see only
the other half of one's soul made flesh, how
that unhoused, dispossessed claim
screeches and whirs through the air frantic for lodging, how
children, soft-boned, hungry and roomy, understand
and take in the unwanted, how it is that
when I see my poems in print, my
distressingly blue-eyed blond poems,
I want to pick them up between thumb and forefinger and,
holding them far out from the body, walk them down to the water
and drown them the way, the way, the
way my brother Dallas, having survived cancer—after being
diagnosed hopeless—a sign
that he was, our parents said,
favored by God, and thinking
he'd escaped our parents, too, having made
a place for himself in a city apart,
took himself, the day the moving vans
deposited his parents' possessions—three months after he was
diagnosed cured—in the outskirts of the city he'd escaped to,
out to their new house, and
seeing the cane-bottomed chairs, the Hepplewhite table,
the Virginia cupboard with the missing pane, the spool beds,
the robin's egg blue camel-back sofa, all the memories emerge
one by one from the van, seeing
that it was true, that they were come,
picked himself up by the scruff of the neck,
went back to his bachelor pad, put Erich Maria Remarque's
Heaven Has No Favorites—look, he was only 22—
on his bedside table, and,
holding himself far out from the body,
got into his red MG TC, drove to the quarry at White, Ga., and
drowned Dallas.
Communion
Lest we think he's gone, our brother
hangs like Jesus from the dining room wall,
watching over the scrambled eggs and biscuits.
In our father's house it is not necessary
to set a place for him. We all
break bread together. Only the joining
of hands, one with the other, singing grace
around the table, breaks the circle.
Behold. My brother is with me always.
In wedding pictures he's taken for the groom.
We are the couple looking at each other
longer than marriage. We are the ones
holding hands. Look at us, here, starting
down the aisle in the amber light
of time exposures. He's going to give me
away. Rose petals mark the path.
In the gingerbread house clergy await us.
We advance, white-framed, through vaulted ribs
into the forest. Step, hesitate. Squeeze
each other's hand to death. He and I know,
the next time we're here, step, hesitate,
he will be rolled down the aisle.
Mother will want the congregation to sing
"Faith of Our Fathers! Living Still."
Our knuckles show white in every picture.
There are no chicken bones for witches.
So it is, in her nightgown, our mother
offers me a hymnal, her dream folded inside.
It's visited her a dozen times. Before dawn,
she captured it on airmail stationary, meaning
to lift her tidings into my heart, her vision
of a private entrance to a stairway
spiraling up from a dark, stone rotunda
into an airy upper room where everything is white
and very clean, where veils billow from long
windows and fluted pilasters soar into sunbeams.
That I may prepare myself, she wants me
to believe, tucked deep in the black notes
between "Holy Spirit, Truth divine" and "This is
my Father's world," there's an enchanted cottage
complete without a kitchen, no sofas, no chairs,
just two Christmas trees and a high bronze bed.
This is where my brother lives. Up there.
Ahead of us. Waiting. And he's so happy.
He holds out his arms and gathers her in.
Now, she's so happy, she's not afraid of dying.
I haven't the heart to tell her it's a dream,
that he's still in my bed, holding me, promising
me Sparkly Plenty dolls for Christmas,
a Bissell sweeper, a long white dress
with a fingertip veil of illusion,
a toy groom, encompassed by rose petals, left
waiting on the wedding cake.
(c) 1993 by Mary Stewart Hammond. All rights reserved.
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