Jane Springer (2)

Maybe it is just a stone & you are not a god-
but one dead human. Were you alone like me
in Newellton - wanting a plot of land to own
where no one would correct, with a whip, what
crop you planted in crooked rows? With someone
to trust your secrets to, who would not ask why?
But make a balm for you & say I'm on your side.

Who made the banjo sad and wrong?
Who made the luckless girl & hell bound boy?
Who made the ballad? The one, I mean,
where lovers gallop down the mountain brush as though in love-
where hooves break ground to blood earth scent.
Who gave the boy swift words to woo the girl from home
& the girl too pretty to leave alone?
[...]
All night Willie's dug
on Polly's grave with a silver spade & every creek they cross
makes one last splash.

When they told us Don't speak until spoken to, we grew
ears the size of corn.

When they forced us to eat everything we swallowed
their hurt whole.

When they hit us for drawing on the wall we painted
doors that opened behind curtains.

For generations they lived like this. Wanting badly to
save us - not knowing how.

& all the while we found love in unlikely places: In
the ravaged church of our bodies & our faces,

refracted in their long faces.

& if not a concert, I'd give you knowledge - of the physical attributes that make raptors
such excellent hunters. From the eyesight of eagles to the silent flight of owls. But that,
too, went fowl - at the aviary, falcons died mid flight -

so all the way back to the hotel we swerved to miss the bodies of falling birds.

Then the hotel burned.

That shell of our house in Calvary, Georgia no longer reminds me of the porch -
old couch & crush of blackberries,

empty-paned windows, cracked board of Lady Day's voice thrown into the musk-dirt yard where we danced -

anymore than it reminds me of the kitchen rats & wire baskets of food hung from the ceiling, or the jerry-rigged,

outdoor shower where we stood in mud to get clean -
[...]
What it does remind me of - that Calvary house -

is how many gallons of water could soak your wings - how many pounds of nails I could hold in my beak & still not break.

He speaks of their love this way, exuberant & eternally naked. Which is how she wanted to remember it, too, after she lost use of her legs. & the two divided beds & eventually rooms that seemed to span separate sides of the house, in Tallahassee, Florida. Cancer does not love to sleep, or to share a bed, but wants a room to itself. This is the way

darkness keeps to itself, its own room of disappointments & dreams-

the owl awake, the cock asleep. The morning glory twisting up the telephone pole & closing the purple shades of its many mouths, till daybreak. The phosphorescence tossed on the gulf waves, until the last of the lit shrimp boats have met the dawning shoreline. Night has its own reality, apart from day.