And one more poem from this book called Link Chain, which
in a way is an analogy to me.
To that time of my life that's gone.
Other kind of place names that are around East Tennessee,
so Gainesville, Tennessee, Chestnut Ridge,
places like that.
A guy named Philbeck, I used to be an acolyte
with in the good old days.
Link Chain, Palm Sunday.
Banana leaves loll in the breaklight.
Back home on Ravine Street, 25 years ago, Philbeck and I
would count the crosses,
arrange the pins on their silver plate,
and bank on a full house.
The palm crosses, tiny and off green
against their purple cloth, are stacked
like ricks with a match flame.
11 o'clock. I take a cross and two pins.
One for the cross and one again, for the heart.
On the front seat of a yellow coach,
pistol red at the wheel, 10 miles this side
of the Gainesville on US 11W, I'd
lay my body down in Tennessee for the first time.
The second time I'd pick a tree, black cherry that
grows on the North side of Chestnut Ridge
and looks out over the Cumberland.
I'd build a floor and face West.
For number three, I'd float in a boat downriver,
whatever river and be a leaf.
Circle by circle, link chain and hair breadth,
I'm bound to the oak mulch.
Those leaves stuffed in their crocker sacks,
my brother and I were sent for each weekend in autumn,
In Moody's woods, to drag back up Hog Hill
and feed the shredder with.
Later, confettied and packed tight in their little mounds,
they warm the milk wood and the slip stalk.
Later still, and less coarse, they're
warming me, bone stock and finger peg, the cold room.
From this pocket to that pocket, by coin
whose slot in the crossed box was cut 38 years ago and cut well,
I roll through the world.
Peter's pence for the red clay, defrocked and worn smooth.
The payment in someone's hand.
Lord of the Anchorite, windblown bird,
dangle your strings and hook me.
I am in the gleam in your good eye.
I am your ticket. Take me up and drop me where I belong.
Each tree I look at contains my coffin.
Each train brings it closer home.
Each flower I cut, I cut for a plastic vase askew
on the red dirt.
The oak trees whisking their wash in the May wind.
Each route I uncover, uncovers me.
Below, 19 bypass swings straight to the state line,
5 miles North.
Virginia, across the bridge.
Each car is the car that brings that tree to Earth, the Earth
to the Earth again.
Big sister, hair heaped like a fresh grave, turns in my arms
as my arms turn.
Her fingers cool tubers against my skin, as we slide.
Slide to the music, humming an old tune.
Knee touching knee.
Step, two, three.
Step, two, three under a hard hatful of leaves.
The grass with its one good limb holding the beat,
a hint of impending form.
It gathers.
It reaches back.
It is caught up.