Blood Lyrics (3 page)

Nothing is nothing, although

he would call me that,
she was nothing.

Those were his words, but his hand was lifting

cigarettes in chains and bridges

of ash-light. He said he didn’t want his body to last.

It wasn’t a year I could argue

against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl

killed on the farm a mile out — brown and silvery, wild —

and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime.

I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses

slowly through the cold, slow as I’d seen

a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor

of my beaten house.

She seemed to see my whole life

by ordinance of some god

who wanted me alive again.

Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken

into the corners of violent sadness.

She wrote my address

across her chest

to let everything listening know

where my life was made.

We waited, either forgetting what we were

or becoming more brightly human in that pine,

in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills,

not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting

from the yard part of what she required.

Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would

when the molasses warmed over the pot enough

to come into the brandy,

to come into the night

begun by small confessions —

that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor,

that the woman he loved was with another man,

his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space.

Then I told of the assault at daybreak between

the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward

the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script

and song. There must have been chanting,

as it was on the hour.

What we said was liturgy meant only for us

and for that night. Not for anyone else

to repeat, live by, believe. Never that.

Our only theories were inside of our hands,

flesh and land, body and prairie.

I reached to smoke down his next-to-last,

which he lit and made ready.

The poultry like a war ration

we ate all the way through.

What we wished, we said.

What we said, we found that night

by these, and no other,

means.

[Does the war want

us to unstitch its side and climb in, to become

its good surgeon?

   Stupid poet, a war can’t know

   what it wants.]

Name those things, too,

you cannot bear the thinking of.

In blackberries and moths Adam drew up a study:

carpet bombs, drones, solitary.

So it behooved God not to create these.

[Savage, Sinner, Scapegoat, Peacekeeper,

Exdrone, Blue Streak, Fireflash.

Long March, Peacekeeper, Gladiator, Grail,

Theatre, Scrooge, Gimlet, Wasserfall,

Blue Eye, Peacekeeper, Patriot, Ash.]

He put pistol shadow

where my husband’s hand had been,

pistol now in hand as shadow,

but unlike any good shadow

of linden or grass, portioned

according to fresh light as it passed,

no time could erase this portion,

no hand could loose such shadow.

Husband
, I said,
look at my hand.

He stared at what a stranger

had put by crime on skin, my land.

I put ideas, camphor, soils in hand

but the pistol only grew

and having little left to lose, I said

give me back my mind
to know

if this is now my steely hand

in which he left such shadow.

By this river wall

this solvent light

it’s stark enough to say

I hate, I think,

I think in the quartz

the water sharpens back

how badly

I would like to have

a cutting tool,

a proven gun.

A heavy work

it must have been

to strip this river of film

so I can say,

there are humans

the worst of dogs

put to shame.

Mercy, have mercy on me.

A shooting gallery!

I step right up:

ten paper men

smile at me

and circle round and round.

O my pellet!

It tears a hole

clean through!

My olde-tymey men,

such steadfast smiles

make happy practice!

I could get used to us.

I did not see a god,

and the god I did not see was not

the god I was told

to see or call, alternately,

in the trade and settle of God’s country

where the farmer’s root crops

were gone, almost —

Shoot me, said the earth,

like a woman who would not

do it to herself. The ones who heard

convinced her why not, why not

even as they took their sticks

to her in the street.

Shoot me, said the earth.
Shoot
.

God is not light upon light, no more

than goat is need upon need,

although there, where it grazes, it is sun upon coat

within which ticks and stray-blown feed burrow

into the pocked skin of such foul scent

covering the underflesh heart that could eat

this farmer’s grain or the barren mountain’s bark

high in the solitude of sheer animal peace

laid over sheer animal terror.

We ask the animal afflicted by its time,

its impoverished American meadow

that drove it to find birch from which to strip its easy feed

to abide with us.

It does not need us. We think it needs us.

We must forgive God God’s story.

the night-war wakes:

Torturers button their canvas shirts.

They straighten their cots.

They bite their toast.

They tidy their folders.

They smoke their smokes.

They tidy their blank, blank folders.

All the little chores

before going on a trip,

theirs is the zeal of children.

To bomb them,

we mustn’t have heard their music

or known their waterless night watch,

we mustn’t have seen how already

the desert was under constant death bells

ringing over sleeping cribs and dry wells.

We couldn’t have wanted

this eavesdropping

of names we’ve never pronounced

praying themselves toward death.

I try to believe in us —

we must not

have heard

their music.

[Tuesday wind brings a letter

from a friend:
Don’t be naïve.
]

I once believed in heavenly clarity —

do you know how good it feels to sing

of certainty, the wild apricot

of the heart orange, large, full of reach

at day’s unlatch?

Inside the mouth, certainty

is a fruit breaking apart.

That is how good it feels:

we would have despised anyone

to keep our song.

[How can God bear it,

the sound of our florid voices, thankful

for the provisions at our table —]

Bells, bells,

     choose an instrument, fall

over antelope in the blue-green cemetery, cemetery,

choose, use yourself, ironworks, scrolls, doubt, body,

make an instrument of your broken lung,

learn landmines, train in the sensitive, immaculate technique

until less skin tears away, won’t you choose,

your loss has made you immune and overwhelming,

into the rice field you wade, able, use yourself

to the night seeding of grain, pull tinctures,

fatten string nets against disease,

someone — photograph the massacre,

you are the canopy, the reed boat, the softly, long-sanded chair.

No one is chosen,

         choose.

After a while, I stopped asking whether my child would survive,

although everything I asked in its stead

could be heard as this question.

Her body, not ready for the bare earth,

and like a nude soul, suffered each thing

with an intuition impossibly more acute

than what her body could carry out

in practice.

I must have seemed, at times, almost unconcerned

by what the clinicians said —

each small, survivable diagnosis touched me only as the sleeve

of a passing stranger.

When I looked up from her hospital crib

to see the wider world, could I help it

if I saw a war?

I can sense you are poised to accuse me now

of that sentimental watershed we call new motherhood:

Because my child was threatened, I too quickly conclude

from my single-mindedness that no one should be threatened,

that we shouldn’t kill

those asleep in their bedclothes

somewhere we haven’t heard of, somewhere

foreign, a desert — an infant, a mother, many cousins.

I concede, it was an emotional time.

I felt I had been dropped from a considerable height

where the future remained, as it always had been,

stridently unknown; it was simply the pitch that had changed.

Now I look out from the nursery window —

first a birch tree, then rowhomes, the city, the country, the world —

still the war widens, wide as a prehistoric mouth,

wide as desperate slander.

If you wish, call me what the postpartum have long been called:

tired mother, overprotective bear,

open sore,

a body made sensitive

to the scent of fire or fume,

just as your mother would have been

when you were born, you who are alive

to read this now.

KATIE FORD
is the author of
Deposition
and
Colosseum
, which was named a “Best Book of 2008” by
Publishers Weekly
and by the
Virginia Quarterly Review.
Her work has appeared in the
New Yorker
, the
Paris Review, Poetry
, and
Poetry International.
Her honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Reading Award. She teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and lives with the writer Josh Emmons and their daughter.