Murder
Ballad
Who made the banjo sad & wrong?
Who made the luckless girl & hell bound boy?
Who made the ballad? The one, I mean,
where lovers gallop down mountain brush as though in
love –
where hooves break ground to blood-earth scent.
Who gave the boy swift words to woo the girl from home,
& the girl too pretty to leave alone? He locks one
arm
beneath her breasts as they ride on – maybe her
apron comes
undone & falls to a ditch of black-eyed-susans.
Maybe
she dreams the clouds are so much flour spilt on heaven's
table.
I've
run the dark county of the heart this music comes from
– but
I don't know where to hammer-on or to drop a thumb to
the
haunted string that sets the story straight: All night
Willie's dug
on Polly's grave with a silver spade & every creek
they cross
makes one last splash. Though flocks of swallows loom
– the one
hung in cedar now will score the girl's last thrill. Tell
me, why do I love this sawmill-tuned melancholy song
& thud of knuckles darkening the banjo face?
Tell me how to erase the ancient, violent beauty
in the devil of not loving what we love.
Salt
Hill
I
was born in a Tennessee sanatorium hours after my mother's
father died & I know
how the womb becomes a salt-sea grave.
I
was born in the last seconds of small crops & small
change rained down on the
collection plate's felt palate & I know
the
soul's barn debt to past generations, too.
Outside,
ditchfuls of chicory flashed in the after-rain sun as
melancholia's purple
scent rose & its steepled fog distilled in Tennessee
hills.
&
I know I'm not supposed to be here on account of all those
crazy aunts & I know
great-grandma was five
when
her Cherokee mother died & her daddy dumped her on
the red clay curb
of an Arkansas reservation then drove away in a wagon
–
how
she just strode the fields of milkweed back to Tennessee
& married her cousin.
When
I was five I drowned a fly in a piepan of water then spooned
it out & heaped
a hill of salt on its still body until I could hear a
buzz again (as if within a belly)
&
I know the rush of the resurrected.
I
was born in the last decade of small town girls wearing
white gloves to funerals.
As
an infant my boy quit suckling long enough to wave to
my mother's ghost –
who used to drift in the doorway of the hours.
&
at three he told me that at my age he had red hair &
broke his neck falling off
a runaway horse – I know
the
rocking chair's set too close to the edge of the porch.
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