Ashland Read online

  One arm gone completely

  and strange internal workings splayed out to us,

  intimate and suspended.

  He’s somebody’s little baby

  smoky white, staggering to the water barrel,

  bent over to kiss the dust with a swoon.

  Some woman runs forward

  too late to catch him.

  We look away from his open mouth,

  look instead at the corn, the crows

  floating above the river in their private worries.

  Tonight, when we turn in,

  the candle will sputter and blow.

  Pinched out easily, all flame

  gives way to this wide black wing.

  Ash

  In the evening, travellers with their

  limbs boiling, some bursting from their skins.

  I stand among the bodies,

  compass dangling.

  I lack an understanding of lightning,

  do not notice the static

  hissing through dry grass

  like a plague of fleas.

  All I see is

  a woman here, a man there.

  Out on the plain, a boy

  struck naked, fleeing his belt buckle,

  the nails in his shoes,

  tossing coins behind him in vain.

  Several children cling to a dead tree,

  delicate and crumbling as a sand-castle.

  My silhouette against a red sky,

  a hunched and horrible figure

  in my pack and rolled blanket.

  I scuff my boot, look back

  at the marks left by my feet,

  at the lavish text scorched everywhere,

  see a dog

  dozing by the still-hot frying pan,

  its whiskers intact.

  Message

  We hoped the disease would ignore us.

  All men think they will avoid

  the rocks, the boil of the waterfall.

  They dream of floating in easy circles at the end,

  their smiling faces upturned.

  We drink in the empty tavern

  or out in the rain, pissing demurely in corners,

  weeping on the steps of the church.

  The sight of us makes God laugh.

  We lose parts of our bodies:

  noses, tongues, throats.

  The prostitutes wince and turn away,

  tighten their belts.

  A rain falls constantly,

  our shoulders and thighs slippery,

  a green slurry growing on our coat collars.

  Sometimes we cannot wrestle our boots off

  to see what has happened to our feet.

  Finally, our strength becomes thin and muffled,

  a circus departing town.

  We sit sometimes in empty yards,

  on warped fences,

  watching birds fuss over tiny things.

  We put guns to each others’ heads,

  click down on nothing.

  And even this seems like a sign,

  a message too simple to be ignored.

  Finally,

  a preacher arrived in town.

  We had been waiting, it seemed, for years,

  and now we had one — a real man of God.

  It was fantastic!

  His lectures went on till morning,

  and many women fainted

  at all the tales of blood.

  He had a huge biting dog

  that went everywhere with him,

  and a nasty glass eye that seemed to disagree

  with whatever he said.

  He dragged us with him through Sodom,

  through Pharaoh’s bedchambers.

  When Abraham lay with his daughters,

  the eye rolled and the dog growled.

  We all clutched our hats in terror.

  We understood his secret lesson:

  God had been free of us once,

  and would be again.

  Easy

  She crests the hill, fetching up

  gusts of locusts

  the woman giant,

  mute in her fine black suit.

  In town, a woeful circus annoys a clot of onlookers.

  The woman levels her gun

  and shoots a juggler through the throat.

  Later, children climb the empty lion cage,

  which only ever held canvas, pegs, slats of wood.

  Little girls step on fallen clocks,

  crunching glass.

  The big woman waves her hat — Come here.

  She has the dead lined up on angled boards.

  “It’s easy,” she says, and shoots a greengrocer

  off his front step.

  “What’s hard about that?” she asks,

  and class ends for the schoolteacher.

  People nod until their hats fall.

  Hidden

  They enter the foothills looking for her.

  The dogs run before them.

  In a snow-covered alpine meadow

  they pause, breathing vapour.

  For once, the dogs shut up.

  A nesting bird erupts at them,

  drags a wing deceitfully behind it.

  The hounds are on it in a second.

  The hidden nest is not so secret now;

  little eggs feel the chill already.

  Omens like this are rare,

  and the men chuckle, nod to each other.

  She cannot escape them now.

  Chalk Cross

  Mountain peaks show up first,

  the world going cold, starting with the sky.

  Our horses are wild at the weather change,

  and we ourselves would rather be in church,

  steaming in our oilskins, nodding off.

  We eat pancakes, sharpen our little knives.

  Women stand at the fence and laugh

  as we fall and fall again from our barbarous mounts.

  The horses have been given names that belittle them,

  and we gather in the stalls at night

  and sip coffee,

  and lean on their trembling rumps.

  What’s to be taken from

  the lessons of the natural world?

  Fear and a pointless suffering.

  We have no questions for the descending dark,

  for we are not yet struggling, and so don’t yet care.

  Little things comfort us:

  a horse with a chalk cross on its forehead,

  rabbits in a pot,

  oblique hints at our own eventual passing.

  Cards turned out

  upon a table, one by one,

  clouds and sun roaring,

  carrying us along to the end.

  Science

  He enters the lab in wet pajama bottoms

  and there it is: an apology

  written in crayon.

  Children have entered at night

  and adopted all the pups.

  A metal beehive of open cell doors,

  beakers of piss, a wet odour of tax evasion

  lingers over his desk.

  He sighs.

  To proceed at all, one must have faith;

  every step a little prayer.

  He had thought that

  science was like a woman.

  She stood crouched over him,

  and the spiked wheels of the sun raged from her

  like the wings of a bird.

  Science stood there grinning,

  a summer day circling her ankles,

 
and around her hands, of course,

  the infinite dark.

  I

  The midwife baptized the baby

  with a cup of melted snow.

  She said, “He won’t last,”

  and he didn’t.

  Nights she lay alone, dark air in a

  corkscrew above her, spiders spinning.

  The husband came and went.

  One morning she met him at the door,

  accepted the bags and rifle from him,

  checked the breech as he had taught her

  and blew a hole in his thigh so the bone

  came out behind.

  Widowed now, or soon,

  the girl sat waiting, sewing a widow’s costume.

  II

  She is unsure which way to go.

  Upriver, or down?

  Pursued by dogs she wades backward

  through the cane brake

  to erase her scent.

  At a ferry, she crosses to a new world,

  hooded and rotting in her funeral skirt

  of curtain and bedspread.

  Mud weighs down her hems

  and she smiles and whispers in

  camaraderie with herself

  while other women hold their children silent

  as if afraid to wake her.

  III

  In a town with a green and greasy fountain,

  she is taken in by a young minister

  who promptly dies.

  In the mornings she can be seen

  churning milk in his

  empty kitchen.

  IV

  Americans come up, driving hairy cattle

  before the advancing horses.

  They are blistered, sleeping erect on their saddles.

  In the evenings they lie drunk in bathtubs

  with cigars and bleeding knuckles.

  She waxes their boots, feeds them, sleeps with them.

  A special few wake to a fatal stab, or a lavish,

  final shaving.

  By ones or twos they disappear,

  and she sells their horses, belt buckles.

  In time, she is considered bad luck

  by all but the acutely drunk.

  Her presence can drive revellers from a tavern

  as quickly as the discharge of a gun,

  and she drifts among the tables

  taking up abandoned cigars.

  In the fall she has another child,

  screaming, sprawled halfway down

  the wide staircase, in full flight from herself.

  But this baby is sturdy, he sticks to life.

  The house falls into disrepair,

  the child silent and watchful,

  leashed to any solid object,

  his mother naked except for trousers,

  sweating and grey by the smoking oven door.

  V

  If she ever slept in her life,

  the boy never saw it.

  He learned to untie knots,

  learned to evade her except when there was food.

  One winter he was gone.

  She scrutinized his tracks, but did not follow.

  As an old woman, she could be seen

  on the narrow rutted roads,

  reaching up as if in prayer

  and there were owls floating around her,

  lazy and curious.

  VI

  The same year the boy left

  she shot her horses, cattle, her dog.

  Then she moved on to her neighbour’s house.

  Animals lay in their blood, struggling to rise.

  Dim riflesmoke drifted in ribbons on the air,

  and cats streaked low through the grass,

  fleas in a matted coat.

  She met her neighbour at his door and shot him,

  then went through the house,

  scrutinizing ornamental plates, doilies,

  the remains of a disturbed lunch.

  The man’s wife stood motionless,

  not bothering to breathe

  or get on with life in any way.

  A clock ticked meanly on the mantle.

  VII

  The widow was taken to an asylum

  where she learned to run a huge metal barrel

  in which dough was kneaded for bread.

  She lost her voice from cigars

  and yet still attempted hymns during services,

  her hissing causing waves of disturbance, moans,

  explosions of cursing among the other inmates.

  She laughed at nothing anymore.

  One by one her teeth fell out,

  and her keepers let it happen.

  They left her bed unchanged, her hair matted,

  food rotting on plates and in clots on her floor.

  They avoided her name when alone with each other,

  as if the word promised affliction.

  In the fall she escaped the grounds,

  a witch running with haggy hair

  dress surging loosely on her wasted frame,

  and was gone.

  They closed her room off,

  nested as it was with a kind of mouldy fur,

  even the walls

  shiny and slick with saliva.

  VIII

  Her bones were found in the spring,

  picked at and nosed apart by animals,

  washed by rain and ditch water and the seeping melt of snow.

  The boy was located,

  now a dark and elegant merchant,

  and he buried her and erected a stone that guessed

  her name and dates, and read, simply, “Gone.”

  IX

  In the taverns, her name has become Mary.

  Men argue over the exact nature of her vileness.

  They imagine she imperilled entire theatre houses,

  killed her lovers, wore their mummified hearts

  against her breast, strung together like pulpy scalps on a string.

  They couple her with her son,

  heap her with monstrous, ill-formed offspring,

  and when they tire of her, fall silent,

  a general disgust for women dwelling in their hearts.

  She lives among the conflicts of her story,

  motiveless, vulgar, a pointless human lesson.

  Some men have a secret pity, or venal desire

  and they alter her according to their needs.

  They fight the conviction that she wanders

  there among them, or visits men in

  their sleep, pitiless and spectral.

  They wake yelping like dogs,

  striking out terrified in the dark

  defending against the quick, descending fury.

  In the hospital gardens, the man with the tripod leans among the roses, blooms caught unfinished by a snap frost, his lungs letting a filament of steam drift out between the hard buds. A nurse waits, murmurs to him, “Come back now, your poor lungs, come inside.” The tall man leans and drags his tripod with him, like a staff, back to the wide hallway. Sunny rooms, the smell of peas cooking in butter.

  He wakes at night thinking: It’s here! Standing on the lawn, touching a balcony railing: It is here, now, looking up. Looking for me.

  He tries to blow his candle out, but there is no candle. He snuffs the moon out with his palms.

  The woman in the lab bends low over a glass slide, cells raging together in a sick little sea. She puts it to the light, “My little fellas grew!” She looks up brightly to see the tall man, his tripod clawed to the doorway, a spider, snapping her photo.

  “Bacilli,�
� she says, by way of introduction.

  She is on the wall now, developed, hanging there in the lobby, holding up someone’s final reckoning like a ripe apple.

  A happy face floats, says, “How are we?” There is a bright light falling, round and needle sharp in the middle. Ninety-eight, ninety-seven. . . . He counts backwards, slowly, his mouth falling open as he turns into the dark.

  He sips his soup, the fever subsided, only this euphoria left, this devouring brood. To him, a hundred projectors have thrown his nightmare on the trees — the white lake dreaming shapes for him alone to see.

  The doctors have collapsed his lung. His body is now heavier on stairs. The strange sound of a panicking man breathing in his ear all night.

  The certainty comes back: it’s out there, licking grainy water from the bricks, patiently waiting. He thinks to warn his neighbour, but that man’s hands are pale, delayed in every movement as if he was parched, curling away from sunlight. The night presses on, endless, one lung pumping.

  Breakfast steams under metal covers. Roses in a waterglass on each table. He eats, stares outside at a gardener bending among flowers to snap the frozen heads. They melt in the gardener’s hands to a red, sweet-smelling mucus. He stares at the wide, square palm holding a geranium stem, a fork hung with the tongues of small animals. He closes his own mouth.

  What is happening to me? All night the children sing and shake me. I dream I am running across smooth lawns toward foothills and then I run up those till the air turns my breath to mud. Children touch my hair, give me sheets and needles, point to the woods, to a dark shape there, standing just out of the sun, panting, tongue out, watching me struggle to breathe.

  The tall man waves his arms and calls for togetherness, scolds a nurse for leaning out of frame. His draped body in its cloak, his face tender over the small box and looking at no one, he sees one woman blow him a kiss, rightside up, upside down, her image like a flag folded on itself, her kiss acrobats, unwanted, all the way home. Later, he lets her sit by him and sparkle, yawn, cry into her champagne, because it’s so sad he can’t drink too.

  He gets up and snaps some more, though the camera is now empty, snaps them all, waving, smiling as if to family, lets their faces wink and melt away.