Dead Man Creek

The water was usually clean
where the river backed upstream
to receive Dead Man Creek,
but we swam out and dived
from anchored inner tubes
for tires, luggage, and books.
Skins sealed with semen
floated. Gar, cottonmouth
and gators were sighted. Once
we netted a bloated human
fetus our fingers dissolved
at touch. But I still have
John Brown’s Body, The Aeneid
(in stilted English), and one
work in the original Greek.

We hung a tire from a limb
over the cove, dried
the books in a driftboard
treehouse, and swung above
the water. We fished with hooks
and nets (gloved hands for cats),
then afterward washed in the stream
beneath the waterfall
and ate our kill and catch,
telling dirty jokes,
talking of cock like virgins.

By a sinking sun we dredged
enormities from each other
with stories: I remember the panthers
crouching in dark shadows
(half-cat, half-human; no way
to tell the real), swaying
with limbs and sounding like beautiful
women distressed. Waiting.
Wanting to bring you to them.
We believed it all. Each
heard the sound in himself.
So real was Albert’s scream
that a startled mockingbird picked up
the cry from the telling to make
a song of our terror, repeating
it purely, repeatedly. Those nights
we headed home, sure
that we would not get there,
weighing the penalties.
      originally in North American Review
      Weighing the Penalties
      The Hard Essential Landsc

Turning, he fuses the threads into tough membranes;
his pushing toward the light scars them with paints.
And through his turning--craftsman, craft, and lathe--
the caterpillar frees the inner moth.

The crumpled wings unfold and season; the moth
beats light into color, flight into form
(himself the flame, smokeless and unconsumed).
Concrete, abstract, he moves at once in both.

The Fence on Lynch Street
   (After the police murders at Jackson State)

No reason`s needed to riot in hell,
but except for the bell the seniors gave the school
and others said stood for Bell Williams, the governor,
yelling TO HELL WITH THE BELL, throwing rocks,
there would not have come, that day,
the sluggish gunsliteyed armored bus(Jackson`s scarred
brain and broken-down human pride).

But devolved to be used, police towed it to the quad,
and after it was towed away, it wasn`t the bullet holes
in the girls` dorm, nor that healed wounds
in the students` bodies still felt exposed,
nor response to an old request, always denied, that Lynch Street,
(named for a Reconstruction congressman) be closed
by a garden of grass and flowers,
nor that those old obituaries never dried.

But because the city couldn`t remove the indelible ghost
of a youth named Philip lying on the lawn turning
the grass red, it raised, instead of flowers,
a chain-link fence with locked double gates across Lynch
and locked single gates across the sidewalks.
Meshed shadows circled grassblades burning in sunpools.

More scalding in the Mississippi sun than white fear
stretched tight, the galvanized chain-link nerves
reared up like newfound fossil bones of extinct sauria.
Shapes of their skeletons terribly misconstrued,
dull triangular teeth glinting wanton ignorance,
they guarded a city and state of their own mind.