Read Online One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] by C. D. Wright - Free Book Online Page A

café au lait. You have your life
until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know
or go to your grave with the song curdled inside you.
No more damned if you did and damned if you didn’t.
Not the mental lethargy in which the days enveloped her
Nor the depleted breasts not the hand that never knew
tenderness nor eyes that glistened
Not the people dragging canvas bags
through the ragged fields
Not the high mean whine of mosquitoes
Not another year of shoe-top cotton
No more white buck shoes for Henry
No peaches this year on the Ridge, and no other elevation
around to coast another mile out of the tank
No eel in L’Anguille
Not the aphrodisiac of crossing over
Not the hole in the muffler circling the house
Not a shot of whiskey before a piece of bread
Not to live anymore as a distended beast
Not the lying-in again
Not the suicide of the goldfish
Not the father’s D.T.’s
Not the map of no-name islands in the river
Not the car burning in the parking lot
Not the sound but the shape of the sound
Not the clouds rucked up over the clothesline
The copperhead in the coleus
Not the air hung with malathion
Not the boomerang of bad feelings
Not stacks of poetry, long-playing albums, the visions of Goya and friends
Not to be resuscitated
and absolutely no priests, up on her elbows, the priests confound you and then they confound you again. They only come clear when you’re on your deathbed. We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us.
Look into the dark heart and you will see what the dark eats other than your heart.
The world is not ineluctably finished
though the watchfires have been doused
more walls have come down
more walls are being built
Sound of the future, uncanny how close
to the sound of the old
At Daddy’s Eyes
“Pusherman” still on the jukebox
Everybody’s past redacted
+ + +

What to say
to the woman given a folded flag who could not sit
and order a soda in the drugstore
to the druggist who pulled the stools out by the roots
still open for business
to the man, living in Reno now, retired, who was arrested
wrongly, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced.
Picked him up one summer evening when he was on his bicycle making deliveries for the drugstore.
Then they let him out one night. Drove him home. Told him to go. Just go.
His family collected cash. His mother made food for the journey.
He took a bus to California. Didn’t know a living soul.
People were wearing purple pants.
Or the man and his sons,
one son already a veteran, beaten by men from all the farms around. They were waiting for them outside the jailhouse.
They turned off the jailhouse lights and let them loose.
He knew every one of them. He fixed flats for the farms. So he knew every blasted one of them.
His sons took off, one jumped from an overpass.
The father beaten so badly he lost an eye. He was given hot coffee at the hospital. A nurse said, If anyone comes in you can’t name, you throw this coffee at them. Anyone.
Your people will be here in no time. You have to go to Memphis.
What to say
to the kids, now scattered, on social security, passed out of this life, or looking after parents, grandchildren; still working a dead-end job
who were arrested, taken in school buses, then in sealed trucks and put in the drained pool.
Kids. Sealed trucks. Put in a cement hole. In the ground.
Held at gunpoint for three days. Parents half out of their minds.
It’s paved over now. A parking lot. But the pump house isn’t gone. Just overgrown.
I had my friend photograph the pump house, its ghost anyway.
The photographer sees a snake and scrambles up the bank with her tripod.
MR. EASTER: Probably a rat snake.
I’m about like you though about a snake. All these years on the river I only saw a poison one about three times.
The wife was afraid of spiders, but she’d skin the snakes people would bring her for a hatband, belts, and whatnot. I’d say, Take that out on the porch. I don’t want a thing to do with them.
When the wife was alive, she kept it