he’ll come, she thinks,

and it will be a son.

The birdbath hushes

behind a cloud
of canebreak and blossoming flame.

Night

Joe ain’t studying nobody.

He laughs his own sweet bourbon banner,

he makes it to work on time.

Late night, Joe retreats through

the straw-link-and-bauble curtain

and up to bed. Joe sleeps. Snores

gently as a child after a day of marbles.

Joe

knows somewhere

he had a father

who would have told him

how to act. Mama,

stout as a yellow turnip,

loved to bewail her wild good luck:

Blackfoot Injun, tall with

hair like a whip. Now

to do it

without him

is the problem. To walk into a day

and quietly absorb.

Joe takes after Mama.

Joe’s Mr. Magoo.

Joe

thinks, half

dreaming, if he ever finds

a place where he can think,

he’d stop clowning

and drinking and then that wife

of his would quit

sending prayers through the chimney.

Ah,

Lucille.

Those eyes, bright and bitter

as cherry bark, those

coltish shins, those thunderous hips!

No wonder he couldn’t leave

her be, no wonder whenever she began to show

he packed a fifth and split.

Joe

in funk and sorrow. Joe

in parkbench celibacy, in apostolic

factory rote, in guilt (the brief

astonishment of memory), in grief when

guilt turns monotonous.

He always knows when to go on home.

Birth

(So there you are at last—
a pip, a button in the grass.
The world’s begun
without you.

And no reception but
accumulated time.
Your face hidden but your name
shuddering on air!)

Lake Erie Skyline, 1930

He lunges, waits, then strikes again.
I’ll make them sweat, he thinks
and does a spider dance
as the fireflies shamble past.

The sky dims slowly; the sun
prefers to do its setting
on the other side of town.
This deeper blue smells
soft. The patterns in it
rearrange—he cups

another fly. (He likes to

shake them dizzy

in his hands, like dice, then

throw them out for luck.

They blink on helplessly

then stagger from the sidewalk

up and gone.)

Sometimes the night arrives

with liquor on its breath,

twice-rinsed and chemical.

Or hopped up, sparking

a nervous shimmy. Or

dangerously still, like his mother

standing next to the stove,

a Bible verse rousing her pursed lips.

He knows what gin is made from—
berries blue. He knows
that Jesus Saves. (His father
calls it Bitches’ Tea.)

And sisters—so many, their

names fantastic, myriad

as the points of a chandelier:

Corinna, Violet, Mary, Fay,

Suzanna, Kit, and Pearl. Each evening

when they came to check

his bed, he held his breath, and still

he smelled the camphor

and hair pomade. Saw

foreheads sleek, spitcurl

embellishing a cheek, lips

soft and lashes spiked

with vaseline. He waited

to be blessed.

They were

Holy Vessels, Mother said:
each had to wait
her Turn. And he, somehow,
was part of the waiting, he was
the chain. He was, somehow,
his father.