One Above & One Below

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

    Your Character Is Your Destiny

        but I'm driving:
to where the prairie sulks
like an ex-husband, pissing
away his downtime in a day-old
shave, the permanent arrangement
this sky moved out on years ago.

You're in my jurisdiction,
the territory that makes old men
look older than their unpolished boots;
where only truckers get by, cranked
on speedballs and shooting up what passes
for an incline; where dead-eyed ranch
dogs drink oil from a roadside pool,

sick in the kind of viscous heat that will
fuck you without asking, and
whenever it feels the need.
You're straight out of my town's
post office, not the face on
the flyer but the blank propped up
behind him. You're the new stoplight,

the red direction from nowhere,
the signal I want to run.

    Plainsong

He lived in a sod house,
a formal nest of grass
that wove green thread
around his soul, a bed
of mud and cellulose.

And she was small. She
never grew; the empty
wind that blew and reared
had bent her to the plains she cared
so little for. But he,

he didn't seem to mind
her size, he'd found
a shape to love there;
and she was spare where
he was generous as sand, the kind

of man who drifted
like the yellow hillsthat lifted
their sloping shoulders to the bad
lands. For her his mud
heart tumbled like the tufted

weeds that wheel along the plains,
that sea of mammoth bones,
that state all made of sky —
they married in July.
Her thin bouquet of corn

flowers remains the brightest thing
he'd ever see. I have her ring
now, a silver band so little
it won't budge over the knuckle
on my pinky. How long

ago, a man gave his grass
soul to her in her brown dress —
and she was always stern,
too small, and learned
to keep inside a sod house.

    Wayward Girl

During their weekly outing, the girl drifts
around the Dairy Barn parking lot,
as the others adjust their plump
figures onto benches at a picnic table.

It is late summer and a dribble
of ice cream spots her maternity dress
where a pattern of washed-out daffodils
wants to decorate her belly.

A transistor radio fizzles out
Motown dance hits.
The girl bums a Pall Mall
off the take-out window boy.

She could be the official model for
generations of trouble, the daughter sent
away, to any place with parentheses,
which, in 1965, lay behind the gates of
the Salvation Army Home for Wayward

Girls. Euphemism suits the plains of her
imagined face, a Nordic face with angles
that conjure nothing more than snow,
deep snow. So her child is born

into trouble and expects to go out
unchanged, cursed with the urge to wander
all troublemakers carry, like a gene
soldered at conception:

in the back of a candy-red Corvair,
on the coat pile in any blue suburban bedroom
as the party music drifts down the hallway:

You don't own me,
I'm not just one of your little toys.
You don't own me,
don't say I can't go with other boys ...

    At St. Sulpice

Because the mind is forever building its model airplane:
locust hum of colored Bakelite,

blue lobelia in a hairy root-ball, plastic bags snapping
open, and unkind

comments up from Florida, or pearl-ribbed
radicchio, purple birthmarks lolling in their bin.

For instance, Delacroix's angel at St. Sulpice
is titian-haired like Nancy Drew, fearless girl detective,

which reminds you of The (solved) Mystery
in the Golden Pavilion

and wings, of course, wings, the angel's mashed
full-nelson in the foreground under Jacob's painted weight

in a church left suspiciously unvisited by tourists
except for two,

two scholars from the Hermitage resembling Cyd Charisse
and Peter Lorre, plus one bald German,

edelweiss, and Passchendaele.
Because the mind is forever building its model airplane

you have traveled off to Paris, saved up the fare
and expectations, have slept wonderfully uncomfortable

on strangely shaped pillows —
except

despite what you paid, everything resembles nothing
more than your hometown: Brigadoon

of perennial (almost eagerly) expected disappointments, as in
why have two scoops if one will do? And why have one,

etc., etc., Yours ... sincerely, I don't believe in this
world sorrow, do you, Miss Honeychurch?

    High Lonesome

Sick now for months, I wake
to the cold glaze of a night sweat,

a metabolic stone
tossed into a mossy river.

The dream keeps me
        company,

faithful as a sunflower, the same
crenulated eye staring
from its chronic bed where
the moon greases the far wall.

In the dark, I hear the snow
counting to itself,
three mississippi, four mississippi ...

The dream listens, too,

old acquaintance,
paid nursemaid nodding in the corner,
the friend you no longer have
to speak with
         to make yourself known.

Welcome, genius loci, djinn fruit
weathering my salted field,

welcome home.

* * *

I am setting off with my father
in the cab of the 7 Up company truck,
his shotgun navigator,
working the route from Lisco to Lodgepole.

August smoked brown at the edges,
a dust-colored moth crushed
beneath the plate glass of the plains'
vaporous sky,
               and I
am perched high on the black
bench seat, thighs pinking
against the burning
vinyl, the chrome radio knobs
in the shape of miniature crowns
too scalding to turn.

        We're working the morning route
from Lisco to Lodgepole,

picking up the empties
for my grandfather, bringing the bottomless
box of stale candy bars and chewing gum
for the gas-station vending machines —
                          and I smell the sugary,
acid stink rising
from the wood-slatted truck bed,
and hear the glass-rattle bell
the green bottles will make when
my father loads them,

the green, glass-rattle bell chattering
thirty miles back to Sidney.

* * *

Virus makes me plural, the whole
unveiled, an archipelago —

each organ cut off from the old continent,
new islands populated by marsupials
for whom we have no names.

Their ringed tails switch in the bloodstream.

* * *

My geography
       is defined by those places
       I was told never to go —

by the lure of the train tracks
stretched out next to the bottling plant,

where the brown bulls and rattlers
drape themselves along the hot rails,
listless, scorched ribbons,
their coils half-hidden in chin-high scrub.

               Not far away,
someone's aunt stands out
of the sun, hugging the shady rim
at the plant's front entry, below the old ad
for Kickapoo Joy Juice, the cartoon Indians
poxed where the paint has flecked away.

                 Usually my father's
younger sister, not paying us any mind,
wearing her discontented face, diamond-
chip earrings, and a shiny summer dress
with quarter-sized spots of perspiration
daubed like perfume under each arm.

* * *

                    The reapers' house
was the only house
visible beyond the tracks,
where it leaned like a paper lantern
from a rise
in the unplowed field.
               You could see the white tarps
laid out in a clearing beyond the front
porch, a cinder block pinning
each edge, the tarps smoothing over
the misshapen packages drying
stiffly below them.

Even then I understood their business —

even then I knew, everything is parts.

* * *

                  Now,
at the side of the highway, comes
the brown-haired girl
with her shoulder blades jutting
out like two pink wishbones,
the brown-haired girl carrying
the white plastic bucket, half-full, and
                           her father bending
over the bloated cow's carcass
down at the edge of the field,
its hard rubber belly hairless
and puckered like a dry lemon peel;
                         her father sawing
with his long-handled knife,
slipping it between
                       the fat and the skin —

* * *

        Sometimes,
she appeared
on the old breezeway, a flock
of smaller kids
wandering out after her.

         And sometimes
it was just her,
the brown-haired girl, her face
following the celebratory alarm
my cousins would make,
flinging handfuls of dust
as the iron rails began to mutter,
the train's pulse humming through us,
the measure for how soon
our freight would come.

    Cephalophore

— for Dennis

Halfway up Montmartre,
the German woman props herself
on a portable chaise
and slips off her bikini top
below the Holy Virgin, who prays
from Her burbling fountain shrine.

French Boy Scouts shimmy
along Her edifice, vying
for an aerial view,
and I, too, hump up the hill,

the steepest hike in Paris,
where St. Denis first lost and then
acquired his higher, patronly purpose —

dead, he walked the city's length,
carrying his freshly severed
head like a martyr's receipt of sale.
Denis: one of the cephalophore,
a category of stubborn saints
who don't lie down until
they choose the grave.