One of the middle poems in the book
is called "Delta Traveler."
It's an elegy for my mother, who was in the Mississippi Delta.
And always wanted to travel a lot,
and got as far as Zanesville, Ohio the first year
she was married.
And then six months later back, she went to the South Pole.
So she never really got out, but I guess.
I was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, where is that one?
Lois, where are you?
I was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee.
I was the first child born in this town,
because it wasn't even a town before we came,
because it was a TVA project.
And in one of those nice little ironies of life,
the doctor who delivered me was called Dr. Hurt, Damn you,
Hurt.
[LAUGHTER]
What are you gonna do?
And he was from Corinth, Mississippi,
and had to come across the lake, around the lake
or something to deliver me and then took on back,
took off back over.
Well, the first-- it's in eight short parts.
And the first part is--
it's about me, and the other seven are about my mother.
"Delta Traveler.
Born in the quarter night, brash tongue on the tongueless
ward.
The moon down, the lake rising on schedule
and Dr. Hurt already across the water and headed home.
And so I came sailing out.
First child, a string with no bed
to lie in, a route with no branch to leave.
The black balloon of promise tied to your wrist.
One inch of pain, and an inch of light.
No wonder the children stand by those moist graves, and produce
is spread on the cobbled streets.
And portraits are carried out, and horns play.
And women in single file untangle corn
from the storage bin and soft cheese.
I see with my eyes against the sunlight, holding in one hand
a death's head, spun sugar and marzipan.
I call it love, and seal my eyes against the sunlight.
I lie down with you, I rise up with you.
If a grain turns in my eye, I know
it is you entering, leaving.
Your name like a lozenge upon my tongue.
You drove through the anti-life scrim and snow scab, fluff stem
hair and tender.
You bloom in your own throat.
Frost, flame in the frost dust.
One scratch on the slipstream, a closed mouth.
High necked and high collared, slumped and creased, a dress
sits in a chair, your dress or your mother's dress.
A dress on a wooden chair in a cold room.
A room with no windows and no doors, full of the East wind.
The dress gets up, windbone and windskin.
Open the window, it is not there.
He goes to the door, it is not there.
The dress goes back and sits down.
The dress gets up.
Three teeth and a thumbnail, white, white.
Four fingers that cradle a black chin, outline
of eye hole and nose hole.
This skull and its one hand float up
from the tar, and lime pit of dreams.
Night after slick night, to lodge
in the fork of the gum tree.
Its three teeth in the leaf light.
Its thumbnail in flash and foil,
its mouth hole a nothing I need to know.
Cat's eye in cloud, you survive.
The porcelain corridors that glide forever
beneath your feet.
The armed lawn chair you sit in.
Your bones like paint.
Your skin the wrong color, all of this you survive.
And hold on, a way of remembering.
A pulse that comes and goes in the night.
Match flare and wink that comes and goes in the night.
If the wafer of light offends me,
if the split tongue and the snake's mouth offends me,
I am not listening.
They make the sound, which is the same sound of the anthill.
The hollow trunk, the fruit of the tree.
It is the echo, the one transmitter of things.
Transcendent and inescapable, it is the cloud.
The mosquitoes' bars, the trickle of water
across the leaf's vein.
And so with the dead, the rock dead in the dust.
Worm and worm filled, pearl milk eye and light in the Earth.
The dead are brought back to us, piece by piece.
Under the sponge lobe, inside the stump
they shine with their secret lives
and grow big with their messages.
Wings beginning to stir, past fixed and hearts clocked.
Rising and falling back, and rising."