Jesus Are Hell

So many ways to break God’s law.
We  heard his wife was killed, the driver
drunk, perhaps a child or two or more
lost in the wreck. Mad,
mad with grief, he hauled out washers,
old cars, scaling trees to post the message:
Hell is Hot! Hot! Hot!

There were versions of the story: that he
drank before but not after.
That he never drank.
That he was driving.
That a stranger drove.
How the sheets smelled of her skin for days after.
We pictured her in a yellow print dress,
cutting the Sunday biscuits with a washed milk can —

None of it was true. The day
God spoke to him was otherwise
unremarkable. His widow yet lives, his children’s
children paint new mottoes, letters thick
on plywood nailed to trees.
Three generations drag their webbed
lawn chairs roadside to answer questions
about who was called, what bush burned,
how sin can turn a girl to salt
or trap a man in the whale’s fat belly.

A landscape of pathology
the woman who studied us said.
She had a dictaphone, notecards, hair
so short her husband shaved her neck
each Thursday. But it was dis-
ease that called him, not sickness.
The need to reimburse
whatever kept the cooler full, the taxes
paid, the girl intact until her wedding night.

Yankees who moved to our hometown
drove down to gawk.
They photographed the kitschy
signs, they laughed about the cache
of crumpled metal cans, Bud or PBR,
piled and staked behind thin octagons
of chicken wire. But we saw how stern the tall
pines loomed, alongside signs promising fire

and eternal burning, salvaged scrap iron,
ugly and rusting to sharp-edged lace, how the words
took dominion over the land around.
Jesus Are Hell —outsiders still puzzle
over the cryptic grammar, no room
in their pale, unaccented English
to hear the way the deep south diphthong
in the word or narrows to the vowel are, no room
to hear the way it claims existence over choice.

 

Whippoorwill

It’s May and you’re so dead
the Astroturf is sharp with age and twice-
replaced, or more, across the graves where you
and Miss Audrey are said to lie, as she
was said to lie, the boy

nothing like you, though Number III
so like they had to call him Hank.
We swap the camera back and forth. I snap
my sister kissing your carved face, she takes
me curled by marble boots, by

marble hat. But that was years-ago
Montgomery, the year my sister
moved three counties south to live down there.
Up here, Ohio’s half-year fog of winter
settles white as niceness, as the voices

that nice all around my plate of root
vegetables, unseasoned, and noodles
piled on potatoes, mashed,
white gravy over all, white, white
these five half-years of winter.

You can never get out of Ohio alive.
Some say you were headed to Canton, some
to Knoxville, where tonight the bands are
tuning up to play the New Year’s concert
you never played, lone

lonely bird--your Tsalagi face
thinner than ever, voice tinny
as an old machine, the heart too tired to try.
The bands play on for hours —
what lies they tell themselves to call this love.

What lies they tell to take you on.
The liver fat from bottle after bottle,
the heart not pine, but muscle, sick,
and sick of it, of all of it, more sick
than I am sick of flat Midwestern mornings.

Your plastic-faced son hip-hops the stage
with Kid Rock for an audience too young to know
how soon they’ll start to lose too much or how
that bird will call them down.
I buy a Hank Williams New Year’s

Memorial Concert blue bandanna
and leave before it’s over
to pack my car,  then drive back north.
Looking back, then looking.
Then never looking back.