Al Maginnes

Against the Hard Weather

This weather, dry and cold enough

to crack the skin stretched

across hinges of bone, has nothing

to ask from the streets it empties,

the bars and lit stores where

the shivering seek respite or from

a sky so wide and stark

any light turns intruder,

false as promises of eternal love

littered on walls and notebook covers,

spray painted on the water tower

by each year’s senior class, bodies

giddy with the notion of escape.

The only work for those who stay

comes where lights stay on all night:

third shift at the assisted care

center or loading bags

at the tiny airport for those able

to depart. The summer I was

supposed to leave, someone returned

from prison, the name of a girl,

who dumped him months before

he was arrested, inked and needled

into his arm, a sad bit

of love-graffiti, made sadder

by the bouquet of swastikas

garlanding her name. She was gone,

never saw her name blaze

living flesh or heard his longing

spill across conversations,

spoiled, overweight, assuming

a welcome that did not exist.

After a few weeks, he found work

at the rest home, sloshing

water the color of stone across

moon-dull floors and mopping,

nose curled against the blossoming

odor of ammonia, pale perfume

he smelled hours after driving home.

One night at the bar, when the dry

edge of fall felt like rescue,

sleeves rolled down to cover

the name he no longer mentioned,

he told us about a resident—his voice

more deliberate when he said residents—

who had outlived even time, existed

in eternal present tense. On nice days

she walked outside where she stooped

mechanical as a crow, to pick up

pecans scattered over the grass.

She always left her day’s gathering

by the back door, and each morning,

just before light, he walked

the wet grass, scattering her harvest

so there would be something for her

to find. Love is something like that,

its arrival forsaking fire and blood

to bring one piece at a time,

objects that fit the hand or fall

away, all of them alike only

because for a moment we think

they are what we need against

the hard weather longing delivers.

*** 

Light from Bodies of Dying Fire

We don’t get long to stand under

            the star-throttled dome of sky, to be

breath paused in the heaving chest

            of the world. Centuries burn

above us so completely it is

            uncertain whether the past

or the future turns to ash,

            then ether, above us. The man watching

the sky through his back yard telescope

            can plot the constructs of Scorpio,

recalcitrant Capricorn, even, if he must,

            angry Cancer, but he will not say

how long since his wife’s touch woke him.

            The telescope can focus

on a single star, fill its lens

            with a solitary fire he mistakes

for loneliness, but the sky has

            no loneliness except what belongs

to the man who must rebuild it

            each night. One conceit says

that in death we ascend to find

            the ones we claimed to love

waiting, reconciled. This might

            be true or we might discover

ourselves floating through

            the universe of lost socks, misplaced

phone numbers, the wrong turns

            and unmatched clothes that are

the lunar debris of  lives, particles

            unclaimed and burning away

so rapidly no telescope can

            register them. He recalls the dust

of freckles across her shoulders,

            tiny constellations whose patterns

he loved too well to memorize.

            She floats in the liquid spell

of morphine, a nurse dozing

            in a chair by the bed while

he orbits the room where

            he no longer sleeps before

lying, near dawn, on the couch,

            one portion of sky visible

though he cannot say from where he rests

            the names of the stars he sees

or how long since light started from

            those bodies of dying fire.

***

What Becomes Holy

My first god washed from the sea, a shell,

            a chunk of coral, steady sleeping reminder

of how much of creation must remain

            beyond my reach. My second god was

the knife I used to drill my name into

            any surface that held still. Now,

it is the nameless wren nested so long

            in the limbs of our slow-dying dogwood

I believe it sleeps under my heart,

            only to be startled into motion by any

pitch or cough. Once, the painted eyes

            of the man carved on the cross locked me

in a blind stare I could never outlast.

            Noise came from the choir box, sounds

harder to translate than wren-song.

            We labor to believe in salvation

but have no power to choose

            what becomes holy. The afternoon

two friends and I held our silence for as long

            as it took the sun to set remains

eternal as baptism or birth. The naïve ear

            bent to a shell hears an ocean

vast an empty as sleep, itself

            a kind of god, shapeless and mostly dark.

The passengers dozing on the plane

            might have been praying, so resolutely

were their eyes shut, their bodies upright,

            mouths open as if to admit the holy song

of the wren. Sun eased into

            the curve of the earth, ice-heavy clouds

glowing bright enough to offer

            a brief hope for miracles. What was there

to pray for from that height

            but safe return to the earth

of iron and seed, of water and rust,

            but deliverance from our brief naps

of terror and faith. The sleeping wren’s

            single god is sky, but fear takes it

so far into the hollows and thickets of trees,

            it loses the sky, lights among

invisible branches to wait,

            as any frightened thing must,

for the furies of the blood to subside

            into language finally able

to dream a way into prayer.

***

Report from a Winter Drought

Whatever my life is, it is

slower than the ticking heart

of a watch I no longer wear.

Few lift their heads after passing

A half-century and exclaim,

“Here I am! Right where I meant

to be,” and I am no exception.

Today, the great mystery and joy

of my life kept tugging me

to my feet for another walk

down the hall or outside to kick

through brown leaves and watch cars pass,

engines and radios bumping

asynchronous rhythms that seem

designed to disrupt the heart.

This is the season of short days,

daytime too brief to contain

the energy of not having been

on this planet long enough

to know you cast a shadow.

At night, after sleep claims

the rest of the house, I listen

to jazz over my earphones,

following the reckless path of horns

with attention I rarely use

anywhere else. Tonight, they block

the brush-soft strokes of slow rain,

the first in weeks. Lake beds have become

tramping ground for scavengers

hunting antique fishing tackle

or fossil proof of what lived

before us. In the next county,

officials are coming the shelves

of school libraries for any books

that might offend. Last month,

I showed my daughter the ocean

for the first time, its unfolding

a story that won’t stop being written,

blacks and grays tumbling over

and over one another like stones

in a hopper, all the treasures

of and geographies of the sea floor

hidden, but I recalled a story

of the five Chinese brothers, each possessed

of one unworldly talent. One could

blow harder than the wind. Another

could draw and bring the drawing

to life. The brother I remember could

drink the ocean dry. He promised

a boy who begged that he would

empty the ocean long enough to let

the boy see what the water hid.

The boy promised to be watchful

and to come back at the signal.

Of course the boy wandered too far,

and the ocean-drinking brother—

stories were crueler then—spit

the ocean back in place,

drowning the boy. No librarian

would stock that book today. We want

fiction of softer consequence.

The story I want from each day

is that my daughter has learned

another work on her walk

into English, small artifacts

of breath and sound and, later,

alphabet arriving to serve her

even in a world where books

disappear from library shelves,

where the past can be slipped

into a pocket and borne away.

There are parts of the past I will

wish to keep hidden from her,

but she will learn everything

I don’t want to tell her

as inevitably as the changing

of weather. For so many years,

I longed to know just one thing

for sure. On walking tours

of historical sites, tourists linger

by old jails, seek the gallows,

the whipping pole. Maybe they want

to believe themselves safe from

imprisonment that allows everything

to be said in the clash of steel

against steel, erasure that leaves

only the name, the half-word scrawled

into a cell wall’s paint. It’s possible

to stand too long, trying

to read the end of the message

that began there or in the splash

and fall of waves, the empty spaces

on shelves. Even the soft recitals

of rain deliver an alphabet. Today,

when I tried reading to her,

my daughter, creature of the moment,

seized the book from my hands

and laughed, my giggling censor,

my half-sized future, my unseen

life continuing.

***

***