Selected Poems (16 page)

as he flings them across the fire for me to catch:

round 1: the shooting, 2: the boozing match!

Each dead can he crushed flat and tossed aside.

(When I was safe back home I also tried

and found, to my great chagrin, aluminum

crushable with pressure from one thumb!)

We stare into his cookout and exchange

neighbourly nothings, gators still in range.

Liberal with his beer-cans he provokes

his gator-watching guest with racist jokes.

Did you know, sir, that gators only eat

dogs and niggers, darker sortsa meat?

But you can eat him if he won’t eat you.

I’ll give you a gator steak to barbecue.

(He knew that cooking’s something that I
do!
)

He’d watched me cooking, and, done out of doors,

cooking could be classed among male chores.

His suspicions of me as some city loafer

who couldn’t gut a mullet or stew gopher

I tried, when I felt him watching, to dispel

by letting him see me working, working well.

I make sure, when he stares over, my swing’s true

when I heave the axe like I’ve seen rednecks do,

both hands well-balanced on the slippery haft,

or make certain that he sees me when I waft

the coals to a fierce glow with my straw hat,

the grill bars spitting goat or gator fat.

If them fireants ain’t stopped with gasoline

you can say goodbye to every inch of green.

They say on the TV they’ll eat their way,

if we don’t check ’em, through the USA!

The ‘red peril’ ’s what we call them bugs down here.

(A hiss for those villains from his seventh beer!)

From this house, you know, we’re near enough to see

space launchings live. The wife watched on TV,

then dashed outside, and saw, with her own eyes,

‘like a silver pen’, she said
, ‘The Enterprise’,

then rushed back for the message from the Prez

who’d just been wounded by some nut. He says:

We feel like giants again!
Taking over space

has made Goliaths of the human race.

Me, I was in the rowboat, trying to relax.

I’d gotten me some chicken, 2 or 3 6-packs

like
relaxing,
and I zoomed out of a snooze

with a sudden start, the way you do with booze,

and saw our spaceship, clear as I see you,

like a bullet disappearing in the blue.

I must say that it made me mighty proud.

I sang
God Bless America
out loud

to those goddam alligators then I got

the biggest of the brutes with one sharp shot.

(But a man might get, say, lovesick, then he shoots

not one of your unendangered gator brutes

that glide so gracefully through silver ooze

and gladden gourmets in those Cross Creek stews,

and instead of potting dumb beasts like your gators

shoots the most acknowledged of all legislators,

on whose scaled back as corpse and cortège glide

the egret of the soul bums its last ride!)

Stuck goat fat’s spitting from my still hot grill.

I’ve eaten very well, and drunk my fill,

and sip my
Early Times
, and to and fro

rock in the rocker watching ashes blow

off the white-haired charcoals and away

into the darkness of the USA.

Higher than the fireflies, not as high as stars,

the sparks fly up between the red hot bars.

I want no truck myself with outer space

except to gaze on from some earthly place

very much like this one in the South,

the taste of
Early Times
warm in my mouth.

Popping meals in pills in zero G

’s not the dining that would do for me.

I’m feeling too composed to break the spell

when mosquitoes probe the veins of mine that swell

like blue earthworms. A head with sting

burrows in the blue, starts syphoning.

Let be!
the watcher in me says,
Let be!

but suddenly the doer side of me

(though my cracker neighbour couldn’t, though he’d tried,

fathom if I’d got a doer side!)

swats the bastard and its legs like hair

sprout from my drop of blood on the cane chair.

The day’s heat rolls away to make night thunder.

I look at the clouded planets and I wonder

if the God who blessed America’s keen eye,

when He looked on that launching, chanced to spy,

in this shrinking world with far too many men,

either the cock-pecked wife who saw a pen …

(If I’d seen it going I’d’ve said

it was my snake sprayed silver, whose black head

my neighbour battered concave like a spoon,

pointing its harmless nose towards the moon,

lacquered in rigor mortis and not bent

into eternity’s encirclement,

curled in a circle, sucking its own tail,

the formed continuum of female/male,

time that devours and endlessly renews,

time the open maw and what it chews,

the way it had mine chewed down here on earth,

the emblem of continuous rebirth

a bleached spine like one strand of Spanish moss –

for all the above
vide sub
Ouroboros!

All this is booktalk, buddy, mere En-

cyclopaedia know-how, not for men!) …

either the cock-pecked wife who saw a pen,

or the lurching rowboat where a red-faced man’s

sprawled beside his shotgun and crushed cans,

who saw a bullet streak off on its trek,

and to that watching God was a mere speck,

the human mite, his rowboat lapped with blood,

the giant gator hunter killing BUD!

A Poem with Two Tails

The fire-patrol plane’s tail-fins flash.

I see it suddenly swoop low,

or maybe it’s scouting out the hash

some ‘crackers’ round here grow.

There’s nothing on our land to hide,

no marijuana here,

I think the patrol’s quite satisfied

the fire-gap’s bulldozed clear.

I’m not concerned what’s in the air

but what’s beneath my feet.

This fire-gap I walk on ’s where

the snake and I will meet.

Where we live is much the same

as other land in the US,

half kept cultivated, tame,

and half left wilderness,

and living on this fire-gap

between wilderness and tilled

is the snake my neighbours want to trap;

they want ‘the motherfucker’ killed.

One man I know round here who’s mean

would blast the hole with dynamite

or flood the lair with gasoline

and maybe set the woods alight.

Against all truculent advice

I’ve let the rattler stay,

and go each day with my flask of ice

to my writing shed this way.

I think the land’s quite big enough

to contain both him and me

as long as the odd, discarded slough

is all of the snake I see.

But I’m aware that one day on this track

there’ll be, when I’m least alert,

all six feet of diamondback

poised to do me mortal hurt,

or I might find its shrugged-off shed –

‘clothes on the beach’, ‘gone missing’,

and just when I supposed him dead

he’s right behind me, hissing.

Although I know I risk my neck

each time I pass I stare

into the gopher hole to check

for signs the rattler’s there.

I see the gopher’s pile of dirt

with like rope-marks dragged through

and I’m at once on the alert

for the killer of the two.

Is it perverse of me to start

each morning as I pass the hole

with a sudden pounding of my heart,

my fear out of control,

my Adam’s apple in a vice

so scared that I mistake

the rattle of my thermos ice

for the angry rattlesnake ?

I’ve started when a pine twig broke

or found I’d only been afraid

of some broken branch of dead live-oak

zig-zagged with sun and shade.

But if some barely starts to sway

against
the movement of the breeze

and most blades lean the other way

that’s when you’d better freeze.

If you’ve dragged a garden hose

through grass that’s one foot tall

that’s the way the rattler goes

if you catch a glimpse at all.

I killed snakes once, about a score

in Africa and in Brazil

yet they filled me with such awe

it seemed gross sacrilege to kill.

Once with matchet and domestic broom

I duelled with a hooded snake

with frightened children in the room

and all our lives at stake.

The snake and I swayed to and fro.

I swung the broom. Her thick hood spread.

I jabbed the broom. She rode the blow

and I hacked off her hooded head.

Then I lopped this ‘laithly worm’

and sliced the creature into nine

reptilian lengths that I saw squirm

as if still one connected spine.

The gaps between the bits I’d lopped

seemed supple snake though made of air

so that I wondered where life stopped

and if death started, where?

Since that time I’ve never killed

any snake that’s come my way

between the wild land and the tilled

where I walk every day

towards my woodland writing shed,

my heart mysteriously stirred

if I get a glimpse of tail or head

or think its rattle’s what I heard

when it’s only a cicada’s chirr

that grates on my cocked ear

not the hidden it/him/her

it so scares me to hear.

I’ve tried at last to come to terms

and deal only through my craft

with this laithliest of laithly worms

with poison fore, grim music aft

that makes my heart jam up my throat

and fills me with fear and wonder

as at the sound made when
Der Tod

(in Strasbourg)
schlägt die Stunde
.

The sainted heroes of the Church

beheaded serpents who stood for

the Mother whose name they had to smirch

to get their own foot in the door.

We had to fight you to survive:

Darkness versus Light!

Now I want you on my land alive

and I don’t want to fight.

Smitten by Jehovah’s curses:

On thy belly thou must go
!

I don’t think Light is what you’re versus

though the Bible tells me so.

I’ve seen you basking in the sun.

I’ve seen you entering the earth.

Darkness and Light to you are one.

You link together death and birth.

The Bible has another fable

that almost puts us on a par,

how God smote low ambitious Babel

for trying to reach too far.

From being once your mortal foe

and wanting all your kind to die

because the Bible told me so,

I now almost identify.

So, snake, old rhyming slang’s

equivalent for looking glass,

when I walk here draw back your fangs

and let your unlikely ally pass.

I’m walking to my shed to write

and work out how they’re linked

what’s called the Darkness and the Light

before we all become extinct.

Laithly, maybe, but Earth-lover,

unmolested, let me go.

so my struggles might discover

what you already know.

As the low-flying fire-patrol

makes the slash and live-oaks sway

I go past the deep-dug gopher hole

where I hope my snake will stay

and stay forever if it likes.

I swear no one on this land will kill

the rattlesnake unless it strikes

then, I give my word, I will.

This fire-gap we trim with care

and mow short twice a year

is where we sometimes spot a hare,

a polecat, snake or deer.

They’re off so fast one scarcely sees

retreating scut or tail

before they’re lost among the trees

and they’ve thrown you off their trail.

But there’s one who doesn’t make

quick dashes for the undergrowth

nor bolts for the barley, that’s the snake

whose length can bridge them both.

I’ve seen it span the fire-gap,

its whole six feet stretched out,

the wild touched by its rattle tip,

the tilled field by its snout.

Stretched out where the scrub’s been mown

the rattler’s lordly manner

treats the earth as all its own,

gap, cereals, savannah.

Best keep to my land if you’re wise.

Once you cross my boundary line

the Bible-belters exorcize

all traces of the serpentine,

from Satan plain to demon drink

the flesh you’re blamed for keeping hot,

all earth-embracing snakes that slink

whether poisonous or not,

the fairy, pacifist, the Red,

maybe somebody who loves the Muse

are all forms of the serpent’s head

their God tells them to bruise,

The God invoked in Titusville

on last night’s local news

against the enemies they’d kill

with the blessed and baptised Cruise.

I fear they’re not the sort to see,

these Christians of the South,

the only real eternity

is a tale (like your tail) in the mouth.

I

When a plumber glues some lengths of PVC