North / South

The tortured air swarms with murder.
If you go south to live, take gun and knife.
The Cuetzalan machete’s blade is dull,
hanging on the wall with mask, chicken foot,
and aging photos from New Orleans.

Her teacher told Cathleen, Again you find
yourself living in Indian country:
Pay heed! She smiles. Such advice from a friend
in New Mexico, our Massachusetts
sanctuary, we didn’t want to move
to Minnesota. We came for money
to pay our bills in old age, and found here
Red Lake, in whose St. Mary’s Mission Church
we make music for mass. To the Irish
priest Patrick Sullivan I confess love
for more-than-holy Oscar Romero
(killed by assassins moving through the line
of poor people taking the sacrament
and even God could not save their Father),
and sacred-among-poets Ernesto
Cardenal (denounced by the last, dead pope,
but vows there is greater work to be done
than giving communion, and the new pope
is like the old). Cathleen’s father was named
for the Irish martyr Robert Emmett,
and Father Sullivan likes to comment
on St. Patrick’s Day how the Ojibwe
and Irish must have a lot in common
with their shared disdain for being kept down,
then he mourns the death of so many young
in Red Lake, whose old also die too soon,
and in Bemidji store clerks follow them
with their hooded eyes, self-appointed hawks
like the law’s wide wings that provide shelter
by filling local cells with savages–

ay! Dios mio, where are You now life
is more fragile: Why not make Mejico
a little safer, give a good night’s sleep
to the denizens of New Orleans:
Paz a los pueblos de las americas!

(14 January 2012)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Elliptical Life

1.

More die from old age.
If the rubber gloves of death are velvet,
at least it is no living death.
Still, what difference would there be . . .
Who could know what happens after . . .
A lifetime later miracles begin:
for me the patience to listen,
for you the room to teach.
Give me rein. I love to ride if you love
me to. Is that being even . . .

If love is miracle it's that only
through living with love's mystery,
with no need to know for certain,
no words to tell what quickens life
before it ends. And who would want to know . . .
For whom would I speak if I did . . .
Are there words that would weave a spell
nothing human is known to do . . .
And without questions,
what answers . . . Horses transport the coffin.
Are our lives filled in by dots with spaces
between . . . Their hooves were muffled beforehand,
they gave passage into silence.

2.

The Garden of Eden we invented.
We needed to make a home the Master
would believe was His only.
He had to try to slay the serpent once
His excessive pride was violated.
She had named the animals, all
Eve saw surrounding her while Adam slept.
Then she saw one more. Were Adam awake
he would know the snake lay between his legs.
They heard the Master shout, Be gone!
Learn to die while living with pain,
earning nothing I don't give you!
Thus the I became inviolable.

In the land of Nod
the unhappy son murdered his brother.
The Master meted out His crass justice:
The mark on Cain’s brow,
promise of resurrection for Abel.
Adam and Eve kept on working.
How could the Master love His slaves
once He lost control . . .
Why would slaves ask . . .
They are human, not He.

(13 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

On Mill Run River

We were living not so far inland as now.
The housing was rundown but plentiful.
Jobs were only beginning to grow scarce.
The new war arrived in the wake of the old.
Poor men poled rafts along Mill Run River.
Returning home the current lay behind.

I do not know how they could keep going.
It took a week to walk to where they lived.
There we found a woman who was dying.
It seemed to her she worked from dawn to dawn.
Her man found money when leaves blew away.
When coins weighed his pockets he left her home.

They were no family, there was no child.
Townspeople sneered when they saw him coming.
Once his supplies were aboard the raft,
he bought a jug of cheap wine to drink down.
He passed the night with a wretched woman
who shared what he had in exchange for warmth.

You remember as well as I our work
was listening. The silence came later
once we heard them out. Then we walked the week
back home. After the woman died he came
here to haunt the indignant town. He walked
until he fell silent where his words were.

Later I remembered all he said once
remembering his youth in a city
where he sat on a stoop drinking Paisano,
eating sourdough, attending to strangers
he put in books no one but his love read.
She believed in him. She kept him alive.

(12 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Left Over Winter

When the sky turns Christ on you, the wind bleeds
a saint’s knees, here’s no earth two feet can walk.
There’s that light on the road to Damascus
for you. Paul’s new shill. Slavery gone to seed
though he knows he can put experience
to good use, or rather ill. The rain falls
alike on your sweet, your pernicious talk.

They had been sitting on the balcony
talking, drinking the wine of Rapallo.
One of them would die with Hitler’s rise,
his friend when Vietnam began to end.
It was ten years after the armistice
of gas, barbed wire, brother against brother.
That had been called the war to end all war.

They discussed poetry as tragedy.
The self and its other. Opposition,
Blake said, is true friendship. Who believed it?
Phantoms inhabited the marketplace
below. There was no going back. Hate thrived.
Though they hung Mussolini upside down,
the people went on starving one by one.

Nothing can happen. The stars have no light
left over. There is no resurrection.
Every country has its own soul’s passage
carved in the origins of mortal speech.
There is no hope even if there are words
that mean what it is to die without hope.
There is only this commerce between us.

(11 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Sex and Death,

Yeats said, were the most important
subjects, mysteries he refused
to fear. When he reached the summit
of his powers old age desired
a mate. It was Georgie Hyde-Lees
shared her body in his bed. She
married the poet as he aged,
Maud Gonne a memory of youth.
Georgie recited in her sleep
history’s turbulent lessons.
She was a wife to perfection.
She too walked among schoolchildren
dancing until they were the dance.
When Yeats sailed to Byzantium
she was there to see the fish leap
in rivers flowing to the sea.
She heard Crazy Jane tell the bishop
why love is made near the body’s
back door. She witnessed all the wraiths
conspiring to keep him working,
his flesh bone weary yet adored.

(10 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Proving Ground

The regimen involves eight hours a day,
the hands more than the feet, the old contrast
between thought and motion, but it’s no way
to grow old, let me tell you: Give up art.

The mind can’t handle the pressures of love.
What can a body do, it doesn’t have
staying power, an old man’s razzmatazz.
What is music now if it can’t be jazz . . .

All the smart made-up rhymes, the make believe
conjuring act, lies to engender love.
There’s always one word you may trip over,
you know what it is, no need to wonder.

Think of art as a way of life, or death.
More stumble when they don’t know the word soul,
they confiscate and lock up the laurel
the precious few would change into a wreath.

It’s the sound of things they teach you. You learn
the lesson well, but you still fail to see . . .
In that enormous, sun-basked world they warn
you, Tell the truth, stay alive, never lie.

Here we are awakened too early now
to do anything but what we are told.
You have created in your sun-crazed mind
what you were told from the first you can’t know.

And now you come to the most difficult
passage. This may be where all gates clang shut.
That’s how it looks when you are lost at sea.
You know where you are but you don’t know why.

What you hear never helps if you can’t see.
When an ocean becomes your proving ground,
look where you’re going. Watch out: a big wave
can undo the breath and the body shut down

the mind. Which is not mental. You need this
unthinking pleasure you considered loss
when you were so young reveille was taps,
when art became a petty thing, mere dross.

Now comes the hard part, your Humpty Dumpty
restoration project, no wall in sight,
no men, no horses, just your paltry art
to mend cracks, or pulverize. Choose the way

and here you take the other side. That way
goes underground: where once it was a street
now it’s open ground, where sea used to be,
a city. Don’t lie. It’s not day but night.

(9 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Painting Music

He was a Sunday painter, Donald J.
Bonnington, M.D. He recommended
Thomas Wolfe’s “The Story of a Novel.”

Only writer he knew was Tom Dooley,
the Jungle Doctor his country called him,
Asians Doctor America.

Wolfe’s story of his Look Homeward, Angel,
was most likely meant to tell me what toil
I was in for, jolt me to consciousness.

When Bonnington mentioned Dooley, I thought
of the song of a twenty-two year old
hung for the murder of his fiancee

in North Carolina, where Wolfe came from
to die in New York the year I was born.
My grandmother’s father was from those hills,

routed out and herded west by soldiers.
He took a white man’s name, sired three children
with a Scots woman: my father’s mother’s

mother and the sister who mothered her
when her mother died and father left her
to go away to be free of his grief,

and a brother once among the richest
men in Fort Smith, Arkansas, his name
still in the sidewalk where his saloon was.

The novel I wrote remains unfinished.
It concerns my father’s matriarchal
manhood after his daddy was murdered.

I turned to a story Bonnington read,
called “Disappearances in Seattle.”
With my approval, he took it upstairs

where the head doctors sat in a circle
and asked if I knew a man named Roethke.
Does he write? Yes, among his other lives.

When spring came I was free to go. Irene was
still living in our town. We fucked. I worked.
I wrote. The notes from my expedition

were clear, I had learned only what was known.
No farm boy lived in Seattle who was
not transformed to dwell thereafter only

in cities. My orphaned friend disappeared
into prison long after a childhood
on the street, then stealing, pimping, pushing.

She who waited tables on graveyard shift,
and happy only when her husband was
out of town, disappeared with randy men:

we shared our beds with wild, unhappy wives.
Cathleen, whom I loved, would never marry
until she could bring with her a dowry

and disappear in this so-called city
where she plays piano with notes I put
to paper. She calls it painting music.

(8 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander