Everything Flows, Nothing Abides

We remain rooted while the placid earth rocks with sudden violence

and the shredded sky itself is falling, falling in slow silent rags

any certainty now fragile as a glass globe, as weak as water

until finally the deceitful calm reclaims its brief dominance:

The relentless sun just beyond the curtains has bleached the windows white

while Waylon Jennings sits, haunted, by the ghosts of every yesterday,

the foot that beat time or kicked dogs or ground a smoke just a phantom now,

veins slow and sugared, wishing just for old times' sake for the good old days

when all the hell they'd raise could be held off, or pushed aside, put away

It's harder these days, walking the streets that surround the walls I've built

around my home, perched as it is on the thinnest skin of the bubble,

to deny, after coming face to face again and again

with the signs, that we're in some kind of store-brand sort of version of hell,

How to explain it, the stillness of his voice, the calm incubated

in his throat. A breath of air cool as VapoRub. But there are no notes.

Just the earthly thing itself is all we're left with, whittled down now to

nothing in the dark dirt of Panola County. And the mystery:

how such a thing came to be, how such a thing could be so enchanted.

one by one in the morning light the birds perch and chirp like cop cars:

find a way, they sing, if you can, to be grateful that the 90-proof

has washed your rotten insides clean for once, the way the rising sun comes

you learned to hide them, the treasures you acquired with your humble labors,

safe from every threat but rumor; the corrosive gossip of neighbors

conspired to leave you to the mercies of a pair of perfect strangers

who knew better than you did that what you keep hid will kill you quicker

than a black bird that skims the cornfield in the dawn's first, earliest light

the world bears witness to the marks they made, whether a scrawled signature

or an ink-dipped paw or a blistered scar where a forest bloomed and burned,

and having bruised the world so deeply, with nothing more for them to prove,

songbirds float upward one by startled one, upward like unmoored balloons;

like blood in zero gravity; like reversed film of leaves falling slow;

no finer time to face the face that swims upward from the mirror's depths

framed by the fading beard; no finer time to face the final hard fact:

the moving clock's hands, clenching jaws, shears in the grip of old atropos

one must live a long time with roughness keeping cheek to jowl with the raw world the trod-upon foot and the split nail the gnarled board gifting deep splinters and the snarl of wasps from under the eaves

pour ourselves into the throats of the never-pleased: the cups, overfilled,

run wild and spilling, efforts to gladden turned to mere titillation. 

hands with no guitar open once and close once; they seek the old pleasure

of wood and wire, the resonance of bent strings giving credence to

the oldest and most comfortable lie, that the echo that rings in 

the vacuum is proof that we somehow continue after the song ends

some time ago:

The sun sinks over Carthage where there's a statue of a hometown hero that guards the city park with his cowboy boots and his guitar and what was once his bloody beating heart.

The moon over Carthage mocks my every move, and the weariness seeps a little closer to the bone. I go drinking with some soldiers who echo my memories of a town I'll never reclaim and a past I can't escape and a future that never feels like home.

The moon wanes and then it expands, outstretches its hands to caress the face of everyone who lies awake tonight. There's a crippling inside me I've got no inclination to fight. And the moon just smiles and bides its time and bites me behind my breath.

7 January 2002

and now: 

The setting sun of Carthage cuts an arc into the hero's hatbrim, the hometown hero who guards the city park with his guitar and boots

while somewhere east or west and sixteen years ago in the cliched cheap motel a younger man I might recognize as myself, all caught up in himself, tries (too hard, always too hard) to shove some kind of meaning into that statue mentioned earlier, entombed in January's early sundowns

I’m dreaming again, just me here, three am, with the jukebox’s buzz,

wondering who the next man will be who I’ll find to bow to and place