"Violence."
"And the night is as dark as mother's closet
with its big woolens.
And in the kitchen a piece of pork hisses in a black pan,
oiled in its own fat, pink and wrinkled as a baby's ass.
Not how can it be imagined, but how not,
how not to be there, under the ceiling bulb where
shadows swell then slacken--
sails in the winds of an argument
of a man with a whole dim tribe called womanhood.
To the left, the parlor, bulges and ruptures of broken springs
and stuffing, the davenport's red velvet
like the blush of blood that comes through the crushed ice
on the cooler's dead pike.
Along the split rail fence, the white hens bloom,
and the far door of the Pentecostal church
is all light and holler.
The uncontrollable pleasure of blessedness
dies to the low shiver of the hymns,
and then the reverend's fist pounds the air,
as though to make someone who is getting up stumble
and fall down, fall down again."