Poetry by David Watts from Having and Keeping
Inheritance
My father is made
of dust and intelligence.
He holds the barn together
with road signs:
Grapette, Lucky Strike,
Burma Shave,
rusty foundlings
cobbling slats together
like stitches in a fence.
He preaches Jesus.
He whistles Turkey in the Straw.
Mother is made from music
and culture. She bakes
bread. Opens her tilted uterus
for two sons.
She plays Five Foot Two
on the ukulele.
She is a long way from Laredo.
They made me
out of farming and music,
embryo
with two lines tangled,
hatched like a confounded
chicken
with a tune in its head.
So it happens the barn hums
old melodies,
names, and notes.
And the cotton rows get counted
as beats in a measure,
like Mozart,
while the combine whistles
a shed full of arias.
My father shows me harrow,
windmill, horse trough.
Already he knows my world
is different.
He knows inheritance
is like jumping through smoke.
He listens for what I hear.
The forest hums.
Even the Johnson grass squeaks
as it grows.
The Delicate Sprigs of Love
He is sitting next to her.
The firmness of her thigh is pressed against his.
There is no light between them.
He listens so heavily
into the heartbeat of her that he hears the murmuring
of aspens on the hillside.
He tells her this.
How could he sit next to her if he didn’t
tell her this?
She is beautiful
in the manner in which there is so much beauty
it almost cancels itself.
I can lie down
in the golden shape of your shadow, he says,
and no longer question myself.
She wonders
if they were just prisoners of the freedom
that brought them there.
Or if to love him
would mean waiting for promises, lying awake,
in the draft of crossing stars.
They kiss
and though he is still alone in the fear that no one will ever kiss him
he is sitting next to her.
Broken Jar
The heart wanders
then it questions itself.
Pleasure, then the horror
of guns and tanks in Syria.
We’d rather ghazals
in moonlight. The turn of a face
as she disappears around
the corner. The desire for peace
while war runs its poison
alongside. Each morsel
of tranquility more precious
as memory chimes in
with hot Louisiana days,
lemonade, and mother
at the piano. I’d like to think
what memory wants us
to think, sitting securely
on its fence post
lifting particles of light
from the broken jar.
But the world is beyond us
even as we live inside it—
The sun comes and goes.
The moon breathes and circles us
with reflected light,
while the soul holds the body
carefully in its arms
as we walk through the perforated dark.
Words
My father used few words.
He moved fearless
from task to task as if
they were meals to be eaten.
Our house grew inglenooks
from the imagination of the carpenter
he became.
From tree limbs of summer
I watched him tote
and saw, driving nails
with the same muscles
that lost baseballs
over West Texas outfields.
Leaves turned.
Snow fell.
All that whiteness
came. Standing
in the emptiness of transition
he spoke
imploring wisdom.
Then, when the inkwell went dry
he reached with great and somber hands
to turn out the light.
Offenbach’s Barcarolle
He wondered why he chose
what he chose to remember,
his mother playing Barcarolle
on the piano—
the sad arrangement of notes
that made his tummy go wonky—not
remembering her practicing,
every perfect note a performance.
He remembers the girl
down the alleyway who told him
adding soap to Kool-Aid
was a way to expand
the taste. Her soft eyes.
He’d believe anything she said.
Cardboard boxes he made
into houses his cats wouldn’t
live in. The rich blossoming
of wisteria. Prunes
he tried to feed the dog. Learning
that longing glances
don’t mean what they seem.
The weather freakish enough
for snow in Texas.
Drivers insane with laughter
sliding into the ditch. The boy
thinking this life was
the one life
he would always lead, mother
at the kitchen table,
dad tinkering in the tool shed,
the strains of Barcarolle
in his brain.
Burma Shave
Crescent of soap
in the dish, absence
where the brushstrokes
brushed, weeks
like that, and then my wife brings
this new cake—Burma Shave,
new lather, old idea,
the way road signs
could be broken
into chains of small
crosses,
aphorisms that went down
in pieces,
a barber who
could make his tie wiggle,
eyes go wall-eyed—little tricks
derived from enough time
and resource to entertain,
facials, boot black,
something of color
in a bottle that splashed
when you shook it,
orange blossom, rose
water, the men
in their shirts, their short
hair, characters
who wouldn’t know
the play had finished its run
but for this new cake
in my dish,
its aroma, its texture,
its name against my skin.
I Tie Knots in the Strings of Memory
and tighten them against forgetting.
They cannot imitate her hungry look,
eyes glazed, lips parted, but they prevent
imperfect forgetting. With my fingers
I choose what I own of the past,
arranging flashes of light
the way a movie wants to be told,
part accuracy, part fiction,
part what the body wants to keep
of its bumblings in this world,
late at night when it pans the past
for gold, the lines tangling and un-
tangling in the swift undertow
of the strong passing current.
Creekside at Smith’s Branch
Along some creeksides
twists of stone lie
among the shale
and the lime, like secrets
a girlfriend wants to tell—
ammonite, trilobite,
toothpaste squirts
with a frozen history. My horse,
old but spunky, I ride hard
against the hills and banksides.
Needing rest and grazing
we spread a blanket of hours
in which I play geologist, absorbing
evidence like globes of light
shining on old texts.
Doesn’t everyone want to know
what is permanent in this world?
I thought I knew, yet one night
beyond this low water bridge,
a girlfriend made love
to another man. Permanence, then,
nothing more than a teen-age
illusion, dissolving in creek water—
car lights down, the night sky
hemorrhaging, the little fossils
inconsolable in their powdery beds.
Another Side of Transgression
He thought of all the time he wasted
being good. Clutched by the guilt
of excellence. Polite.
Well-trained. But when
the long summer afternoons came,
too hot to move
from the window fan, scent
of vapor rising
from water jackets, he found pleasure
in doing the nothing that had no regrets—
wasted afternoons
under the Wisteria vine when no one
was watching. Aroma thick
as a breeze on his shoulder.
Thinking of women constantly, forgetting
to water the chickens
in the barn. He was beginning to feel
the release of duty, to feel
what it’s like to feel.
Demands waiting like barking dogs
at the periphery. His good intention
to visit the sick woman
falling aside
as he listened to the rattle of starlings
in the rafters—discovering that strange lightness
of the body. And the new importance
of oak branches
where they separate from the trunk.
How far out the leaves
begin to spread.
The startling arrangement
of moss
like whiskers without discipline.
The long plains of earth
reaching to the clouds
behind the back yard fence.
How the ground pushes back when you walk.
Na Trang
My brother straps on his webbing, his belt,
his canteen, sidearm . . . gone
are the colors he was—blue jeans,
white shirt, sweet potato skin—
he is so deep in camouflage
even his blue eyes
are like cinders. He climbs
to his bunker,
mushroom of concrete and divots,
ear to a shortwave
that sneezes facts and lies
that no one can remember,
each moment of cigarettes and coffee
possibly the last. Nothing
could have prepared him for this . . .
. . . death little more
than the morning news.
Something happened to him there.
I don’t know what it was but
it taught him how to leave this life
real easy, bowing to the side
to let the train he was riding
pass on by. After that,
death was just another order to obey,
flat, like a paper command,
a switch to turn off the static
they jammed down his ear.