I was born in the plankhouse on The
Hill
I was born in the plankhouse on The Hill and I believed
the hill and the house together
And I became the things there, the big oak the teacher
told me to use for dusting erasers,
The red-brick
school now a Retirement Home,
The clearing-throat humph my principal, Mr.
Woodlief.
The hunts on Thanksgiving, the rabbits on the
run,
The blue-tail never returning where he was
jumped,
The cotton-tail
always coming back to his squat,
The boy himself never settling down.
Years fold up like throw-rugs.
And an aching in my chest sleep does not assuage, that
deep, wide other I search for,
The flight of the martins, the one bluebird egg, a
mid-June discovery in the box,
A second
one, tomorrow?
No mere odor surprises me more than the smell of dried
manure.
I sink my pitchfork in deep and turn the bottom fluid,
foul-streaming wings on the prongs
And sling the stuff into my wagon.
O Earth so full
of it and more.
Barefooted, dodging the chicken-manures, I skip to the
barn to do the chores,
The oaktree roots grimaces of my neighbors, one saying to
me,
“An adverb is the white part of chicken shit.”
Grammar, as far
as I know, bubbles.
A field covered with fertilizer-manure!
Rising in that smell from the ten-acre field over the
neighborhood,
Scrolling puffs from some gigantic pipe, rooting around
Mama’s butterbeans and melons.
Do you think vanquishing your beloved is
great?
To be bettered is just as grand and perhaps
sweeter.
It’s a leveler, like vacuuming occasionally, shaking the
dust-mop over the railing.
The terrace reminds you that the world waits for
sunrise.
With all my soul, now, among bluebird eggs and martin
gourds,
The fledging, spreading, pressing entrances and exits,
with Purple Martins
Teaching me how to worship the grass beneath my feet, I
yell as far as I can − Hellooooo!
So much for staring at the stars.
They’re there, at the end of words.
Feel love available in the bottom line where the dollar
lies.
Faith tears away division.
Pain gestures the down-and-out Nothing everything
courts.
May the ride not leave me in the provinces
alone.
The ocean waves an understanding smile,
Lifting mother
and child, the grains of sand, tight.
The moon over the docks, seabirds feather the shoreline.
Who makes the weeds among the periwinkle?
Venus wings midnight .
Who made the two swallows in their mud-hut on the
light-fixture over the Miata?
The purple martins pursue the vanishing
mosquitoes.
One blade in my hand, another waiting, I hunch into the
corner of the table,
Holding a far-away look, pressing the grinder to the
blade.
The shower begins, goggles secure over my
face.
My mother washes clothes by hand and wrings them and
hangs them out to dry.
I pick up depression-glass, pink-light.
Always the world’s just outside, waiting.
“Paul, you spend more money on these dogs than you do on
your family.”
My father cut the logs in Beaver Dam and took them to the
saw-mill,
The blueprints on the kitchen table.
There was once a man, tall, dark-complected, he’d say, as
a Croatan,
A western Johnstonian out of North Carolina ’s Coastal
Plain.
He never had even a drawer assigned to him,
His trinkets − a Bible he inherited and some shotgun
shells ready
Lying in a baby’s basket interlaced with light blue
ribbon atop a chifforobe in that room.
The living room did not look “funny” with the bed in it
any more than the morning
I saw a floppy rubber stuck to the molding on the
wall-side of their bed,
The pink bedspread, its bobbed dots fluffy, though no
cover at all.
I had seen Jerry Surles blow one up at school.
Not a day goes by I don’t think of Mama.
And sometimes I wonder if she ever thinks of
me,
If she could, my father, too, smiling into his
partial-gold tooth,
Pride singing in his eyes − the girls always took to
me.
Rising heat around the crepe myrtles, boughs nearly on
the ground,
Wire-grass edges toward the new dogwood’s
base,
The proud barn-swallows flitting fur from their little
adobe,
The trip to Central America a whizz nobody knows, not the
federales,
Not any other source outside this place, this
hill
Proud with
mourning doves.
The hounds bark constantly.
The hummers emerald August’s dominion over the pink
petals.
The black nuthatch walks down the oak and the wobbling
finch lands on the stick.
My mother’s feet pad the linoleum.
The old house she wanted to leave we have
restored.
So let me love you this much and let me tune the cracks
between the ivories.
Bring on the bass, including the near misses of
fingertips on the strings.
New storms appear, as the bird-clock marks a different
song.
The blues, lovesick, harbors you.
A morning glory, pink as the inside of a beautiful and
lovely cavity of clay,
Climbs onto a lilac and runs through a maze of hearts, a
satisfying majesty,
A piano clinging to the melody, the well-drilling memory
of a man riding a bucket
Down a mule-lot well for a mutt, my mother’s
Brownie.
My sister, Rose, appears, chasing the pigs in the
sweet-potato patch.
September’s the mistress in me, buddy in a cycle’s
seat.
The piss in the cow-pen smells a little different in the
morning.
The dew turns my nose up to a breeze in definite
reach.
Collards cook on the woodstove.
The night’s real over Paul’s Hill, cupped in an egg my
mother breaks,
Leaving the shells halved, perfectly.
What happened to the whippoorwill in “I’m So Lonesome I
Could Cry,”
The fields, their browning tendrils tending
everything?
What happened to the streams I fished?
The paths I walked and tangled my lines in?
Once the plankhouse sat rocking away.
The dogwood petals crinkled over each leaf a scarred and
scored symphony.
I said This is a love poem, with levels and prairies of
harmonies,
Flutes, pennywhistles, recorders, snares,
Bridges to rags and reels, our band as much a part of
living as breathing.
I’m right back where I started from, loving you from this
red clay
The sun lays over cotton-fields, films of heat-pocked
leaves blessing summer’s longing.
“I love you once again.”
The eyes of migrants, larger than Carolina , hummer-hubs,
shape-drifters, packer-whirrs,
I know when
imperfection slinks into a room.
I smell the cantaloupes on the plant that volunteered in
the dogwood mulch.
Praise trial and error! Let hills and
valleys residue.
A sign outside Vander: “Buy a cock and
pullet!”
I stop and speak to the maiden and she is clueless of my
state of mind.
Near Mount Olive, North Carolina , in a cornfield’s
edge,
A plank on a stob, been there since static:
“Our hens lay eggs to FM Music.”
Laughter and crying − we start from scratch and go
busted.
After the dirt and the pavement:
Governor W. Kerr Scott’s epitaph:
He
plowed to the end of the row.
His furrow was deep.
Time will not erase his indelible
imprint.
A woman arrives at The Egg Place, asking for some cracked
eggs:
“They are cheaper, aren’t’ they?”
Egg Man: “I don’t have none today, mam, but
I can crack you some.”
I do not know where to turn.
Things are not clear anymore.
Morning’s a hit-the-floor without socks.
Birds cheep and bloob.
I brush the
matter out of my eyes.
My dreamer’s in her white pajamas.
She loves laps in a pool.
I pray I may remember all this.
O for no
trouble in her thoughts.
Manly must make a living as a farmer, veteran,
husband, father.
Martha’s eyes wander.
She’s happy her man came home.
Something about the smell of anything makes
her sick and out of place.
My mother took me down near New Zealand Church to visit
her people
And her cousin, a scraggly, beautiful woman,
Lessy.
She showed us where she slept, her bureau turned to the
wall.
She said she had to get her wagon and pick up the acorns
off the ground.
Saved them, she said, for the woodpeckers.
They’d hammer holes in a dead oak and store food for
winter.
Then she looked
away.
I never saw her
again.
Among women, picking cotton, Lessy said such things
−
“Ain’t that a pretty cotton blossom, all yellow, pink,
and blue
And look at that dragonfly making love to
anothern.”
I remember the times I sat under the overhang at the
cow-stable.
During a
drizzle I would get goose-pimples.
The final call
could be made on a turkey-yelper.
Shelby Stephenson's Playing Dead is
from Finishing Line Press.
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