ABSTRACT 
Title of Thesis: THE CHIMNEY 
Name of degree candidate: Pattick Phillips 
Degree and Year: Master of Fine Arts, 1995 
Thesis directed by: Stanley Plumly 
Professor 
Department of English 
Creative Writing 
There is nothing worse, I think, than paraphrasing a poem, 
much less a whole manuscript of poems. Doing so wrongly implies 
that poetry exists mainly as ideas, and not, as it trnly does, as 
words. Thus, that an "abstract" should summarize the writing in 
this thesis seems to me not only impossible, but also undesirable. 
Instead, for an expression of my methodology I offer the poems 
themselves, many of which take the form of the ars poetica; they 
discuss what I try to do when writing far better than I ever could 
here. All I can say to introduce the poems, then, is that I hope they 
speak for themselves. 
THE CHIMNEY 
by 
Patrick Plullips 
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School 
of The University of Maryland in pa1tial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of 
Master of Fine Arts 
1995 
I : r ' l 
Advisory Committee: ~'b 
Professor Stanley Plumly Chairman/A dvisor ...~:;  ,.:.. 
Associate Professor Michael Collier ,f.fi1 If) 
Assistant Professor Phillis Levin 
J-Jh "'fJ..; 
f C 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Section Page 
ONE 
Pre-Dawn 2 
Dishes 3 
The Body 4 
Baptism 5 
Late August 6 
The Chimney 7 
Plate 8 
The Fiddler 9 
U.S. Steel 11 
At Chickamauga Battlefield 13 
TWO 16 
Wrong 17 
Strawberries 19 
Spring 21 
11 
Miche11e King 22 
The Rest-Stop 23 
Commute 25 
At the Dinner Pa1ty 26 
Mobile 27 
Motion 28 
THREE 31 
Portrait of Bela Walker with Bicycle, 1898 32 
The Last Days 34 
Two Dreams 36 
Catch 37 
To My Brother, Remembered 39 
Chattahoochee 41 
Ill 
ONE 
l 
PRE-DAWN 
'This time I am a Danish landsman 
working a dairy farm near the Jutland coast. 
It is not strange to wake, as I have, 
at 4 am, pull a jump-suit off the pegs 
in the mud-room, and crunch across the yard, 
moonlit and snowy, to the stalls 
where I attach a glove-shaped milker 
to each pink udder of the Holsteins, 
who scrape their hooves on the concrete 
and swing their heavy necks as I pass. 
Through the dark hours I watch for Venus, 
transparent over the heather. I listen 
to the sound of a car on the highway, 
skipping a gear: someone not used to the hour, 
someone anxious to reach the first ferry 
to Odense. I stumble over a tractor' s muddy, 
frozen imprint and catch myself without te1Tor. 
I am used to the pre-dawn stillness, 
the quiet of the birds. 111e blue tint of the world 
does not frighten me as it did just now, 
when I woke in the dark and saw headlights 
moving through the trees, crossing the wooden b1idge, 
throwing the shadow of a window 
across my childhood bed in Georgia, 
where I woke already groping for the light. 
2 
DISHES 
At home the sun is settling down 
in the pasture brush and cow paths 
on tbe hill, wading into tbe l101izon, 
watchful of the hours as tbe last rays 
called home run back to it, snatched 
from between my mother's dripping fingers. 
Moments ago she stood absent, stirring 
amber dinner dish water, eyes up the hill, 
to the sun again, to the narrow sky 
pushed almost out of sight by Billy' s 
lower pasture, the green hillside sown 
only witb salt-licks and tractor paths, 
lingering signs of a long departed herd, 
and below the open gate a driveway: 
potholes and weeds for Billy to cut 
on Sunday. All that is visible hangs 
in the window-frame, draped in sunlight 
and the wandering vines ofbouse plants, 
lanky and awkward in their pots. 
3 
THE BODY 
All this time I have tried and not escaped 
for a second. All my life I have watched 
for the chance. I've felt my right ankle 
ache wider the weight of my leg. I've seen 
my blood on my hands, my hair 
on the living-room floor. All night I've 
pushed pieces of myself out the door, 
all month I've fowid remnants of hair: 
the hair in the pie-plate, the hair in the sink, 
the hair in the crease of this notebook. 
I've thrown myself out like a white bone 
for the dog, only to bear a light breath 
in my ear, as my hand plants a tulip, 
as my foot comes down on the shovel. 
I have bwied myself in the backyard 
and stomped on the mowid. I have fom1d 
my body in a comer of the shed, propped 
where I meant to put back the rake. 
4 
- - ---~- -------
BAPTISM 
So often have I heard it, 
I can name the poker-players at the table, 
all dead now but bald Fred Hall 
and famous Dan Vitali. 
I can see their cans of Pabst 
sweating rings into the wood, 
and smell, in the first room I remember, 
the sweet blue smoke of their cigars. 
Over the humming fridge, the clacking Kenmore dryer, 
I can hear their chairs scrape the floor 
as they turn to face my father, 
standing by the kitchen sink 
in his long black robe, am1s spread wide, 
blessing the basin of rusty county water. 
I can feel his thumbs in my armpits 
when he lifts me up near the glaring bulb, for all to see, 
and in the silence after I am touched 
the third and final time, before he sets me down, 
I can hear him shouting ghost, 
then the others, whispering amen. 
5 
,-- -- ------- -- ------
LATE AUGUST 
and the brown-skinned men in the park 
are tending their camps, setting bricks 
around the edges oftai:ps, gathering milk-crates 
and dragging old blankets in from the dew. 
I am sitting on a bench 
listening to Spanish voices soften 
behind walls of wet cardboard, 
as the sky cools from violet to blue, 
as the night draws :fishermen 
to the bridge, a thousand miles south, 
where, I know, they are baiting for shad 
even now, 
watching for the first star in the sky. 
Someone casts into the dark, 
the whine of his reel can-ying over the water, 
to the dock where I used to watch Venus rising in the west, 
where the tree frogs breathed their two notes, in and out, 
and brown moths dove at my flashlight. 
The house up the hill must be quiet now, 
the porch screens silver with rain. 
A motor dies far off 011 the water, 
a wave slaps the side of a boat. 
fu the dark, a fishjumps so loud I expect it 
to flop doWll beside me, here on the grass. 
6 
THE CIDMNEY 
Inside the chimney that my father built 
with stones we hauled from Six Mile Creek,  
underneath the soot, above the flue, 
is a penny that I watched him press into the mortar 
before he hefted into place another slab of shale, 
another brick of fractured gypsum, 
so that when the pitched roof falls, 
when tbe shingles and the cherry rafters crack 
and bum in someone else' s fire, 
on that morning when the chimney stands marooned 
in the clearing in the woods, and later falls, 
smooth stones sliding down the hill, 
when someone, a young man walking to the creek mouth, 
stops at the glint oflight from a rock, mica or quartz, 
and finds a coin so old 
he can barely see the year, 
then, my father said, someone will think of him, 
long ago pulling the penny from his pocket 
and pressing it against the drying chimney, 
leaving his long thumbprint swirling. 
7 
-- ---?- -- - - ------
PLATE 
How many matching, patterned plates 
were bought and broken 
in the kitchens of my childhood? 
This one from Kroge1Js 
my mother, years ago 
put widemeath this fem. 
I moved the plant 
to move the sofa 
to try to fix the stereo 
and there: my fathe1Js fat wrist, 
the face ofh is watch facing down, 
passing me the plate as he speaks, 
as if it is 1975 
and my mother is going, any minute, 
to smash the dishes on the sticky floor. 
8 
THE FIDDLER 
Grab your right wrist with your left hand 
and that is how they hold the rounded stocks, 
in a circle bristling 
with banjo and guitar necks, mandolins and fiddles 
the w1cut ends of metal strings ' 
nodding Jike hazel-rods bending over water. 
We sit on coolers and loose-slung lawn-chairs, waiting 
while they tune and pick out melodies: Omie Wise 
and Georgie Buck, The Gospel Ship, The Old Home Place, 
eve1ything returning- openings and rw1s and breaks, 
serenades and waltzes, dirges played 
the way they heard them 
sixty years ago--the cross-picked banjo, 
the fiddle wailing like the dead. 
We listen to the stories 
of the drowning bride, the rocky field, 
the rebel soldier dying, 
and the hobo ' s stream of whiskey, 
no one able to jig or clog 
the way their fathers stomped their heels, 
the way their mothers, gathering long skiits into their fists, 
waded through the summer grass. .. 
We sigh our understanding sighs 
and nod as ifwe know wliat it means 
9 
-?? -------
to shake their hands when it is over, 
to hold the fiddler's delicate hand in our hands, 
and squeeze his bones and brittle tendons. 
10 
U.S. STEEL 
The brick stacks are cold and quiet-
nothing like they looked when I'd wake 
wider the window, on the ledge over the back seat, 
and watch the chimneys pass, 
pumping clouds of sulfur, staining the sky 
the yellow of his palms. 
The strip-miners are gone, 
the water-cannons that scrubbed the mountain, 
the explosions that sprinkled dust on the windshield. 
I taste Birmingham's cJean air 
and leave the car and walk toward the mill, 
crossing ruins blanketed with clover, 
concrete slabs and low wa11s left by the wreckers. 
I climb a familiar stoop on a comer Jot 
and step into the kitc11en on Coke Street: 
there was a buck's head over the mantle, 
a broken air conditioner in the comer, 
a window where I am standing, 
where for forty years she watc11ed him 
walk the path I fo11ow to the mill, 
where he stood over the ingots 
like Vulcan, squinting at pools of slag. 
Inside, I climb over a charred ladle, 
and stand in the cold fumace, 
I I 
my white sneakers planted on the floor: 
Armstrong's boots on tl1e moon, 
a bird on the wiinkled skin of an elephant. 
This could so easily be a dream, something he imagined 
walking through the dark, eyes on his boots, 
not looking up m1til he reached the parking lot 
and fom1d the roof intact, the sooty windows whole, 
the kudzu cut away from the door. 
Standing in the cracked, cold crucible, 
holding a pair of rusted tongs, 
I pick through the black ash, 
inventing his unknowable dream: 
a doe on her side in the leaves-
he bends to stroke her white belly 
and pull out his arrow. 
12 
AT CIBCKAMAUGA BATTLEFIELD 
It is not my great grandfather or his uncle, 
not the great-grand anything of anyone I know, 
not a Phillips, a Glasgow, or a Miller who I see 
walking through the unmowed pastme, 
coming down the hill from Summerville, 
out of the woods that mn unbroken no 1th, 
through Rabun Gap, to Tem1essee. 
He does not grab a switch of grass 
or wad of rabbit weed to chew, does not 
break sticks or sing or count his steps to pass the time. 
He does not hook his thumbs through the straps 
of his faded overalls, or wear a hat, 
or look at the chiseled mile posts 
with anything you would call fear, 
as he moves closer to the Dairy Queen 
off Highway 12, east of 59, 
where I have stopped 
after the long leg of Virginia and the Carolinas. 
It is Labor Day weekend- the restaurant full of vacationers, 
minivans and Winnebagos headed home, 
inching down the mountain, 
creeping into the foggy parking lot. 
High over my head, a vast cloud moves south 
and the shadow on the valley turns to silver. 
The moon reveals faint trails worn into the hillside, 
and a shallow stream beside the road, below the guard-rail. 
13 
It is easy to imagine the road as a footpath through the woods, 
a bald strip smoothed by the feet of Iroquois and Creek. 
It is easy to see the wigwams standing, 
the fires burnmg again. Sitting beside Highway 12, 
sipping coffee from the Dairy Queen, 
it is easy to imagine the war fought here, 
the tents pitched on the level field 
a hundred years ago. I see 
the bodies hanging from the giant oak, 
the illegible gravestones sliding into the creek. 
It is easy to imagine a man 
coming down the hill from Tennessee, 
secretly hoping he does not reach the field, 
hoping that somehow he will fall behlnd, 
or learn the fighting ' s over 
before the hawks and rhododendron disappear. 
He peels a handle off a walking stick 
and looks back the way he came. 
By daybreak, 
he could make it to the beginning of the woods, 
to the place where yesterday 
he stood and shooed the dogs back home. 
I stand at the edge of the parking lot, 
across the level field, a cool, late-night wind 
brushing over the grass behind the dumpster, 
and imagine his body stretched on the ground, 
pale face turned west, toward 01ion, 
tilted high in the black sky over the Dairy Queen. 
14 
We are in the same dream: tomorrow 
I will hear the nurses ringing out their skitt s, 
and see, in the early-morning torch-light, 
the muddy field, the bodies heaped behind the hospital-tent, 
the tents by the stream, and the stream by itself, 
tippling where the road was. 
In the halo of the restaurant, I hear myself talking, 
talking like th.is, like the man who came down from the hills, 
when he woke, as I have, covered in sweat, 
from the last dream of his life, 
the recurring dream of th.is place: 
the ground suddenly gone underneath me, 
I jerk awake in the dark, 
from the oldest dream, of endless falling. 
15 
-~- -=--:-r -?=-~---=-'~-=~- ------------
TWO 
16 
WRONG 
Here on the jacket is Dizzy Gillespie 
at the foot of a grand marble stair. 
Tuxedoed, hamming for the cameras, 
he's made it- the clothes, 
the smile---everyth.ing perfect 
but the bell of the trumpet he holds, 
bent by a mis-step in a dark apartment 
in Harlem, years ago: it veers off 
wrong-angled toward the ceiling, 
like something invented 
to sound exactly the way it sounds 
now, on the record. 
And here are the cheeks, 
the famous, gigantic cheeks 
puffed to the eyes 
and down the loose neck as he plays 
the way no one cau teach you, not 
with the strong abdominals, not with the diaphragm, 
but through the cheeks, all cheeks, 
everything about it beautifully 
wrong ... The way Junior Wells 
bends a note on the harmonica, 
invented for Bavarian oompahs. 
He plays the blues 
scale that rose from the harp like a genie, 
when a black GI first played 
17 
a 10 pfennig Hohner: the sound canyiug 
across an Allied camp, to the barracks 
where a defeated Gennan sat 
listening, hating him for playing it 
wrong, though longing to be nearer ... 
The way, even now, as I write tbis, 
getting it wrong, failing to say 
what I mean, I pray to the spirit 
in Gillespie's cheeks, to the air 
vibrating the reed of the ha1monica: 
that I may be so wrong. 
18 
. ii . LS . I& __ ;; 771 
STRAWBERRIES 
The Haitians are pulling down the market 
on Eighteenth, unscrewing c-clamps 
and passing two-by-fours to someone in a van. 
The sun falls behind the church-spu-e, 
the neon signs buzz on in liquor stores. 
I walk past the fruit-seller with the blue-black tattoo, 
who smiles and mutters in Creole 
and hands me an egg-crate of strawbenies ... 
Through fields of lilac and yellow mustard, 
on the island ofFyn, in Denmark, I rode a bicycle, 
pedaling hard despite au axle that skipped on the down-stroke, 
despite a hole it had worn in my shoe. 
The hay truck carried men and women, hands 
pushed through the wooden rails, legs swinging from the back. 
I never knew where it would stop, 
which rows were ready on what morning. 
I watched the women with their kerchiefed heads 
and hinged hips, bending like ostriches, 
stroking the leaves, 
shuffling berries into their aprons ... 
Not even the Creole knows who filled th.is ca11on, 
back bent in the middle of a row, 
head turned up to watch the glint of an airplane 
passing over the quilt of fields. 
Say it was a woman. Say she is finally leaving 
the rows, as night comes, 
19 
~-- -? !!ZUJ-54 &1E 
as the light turns on Eighteenth, 
as the sign over the bank flashes the time. 
I walk home, trunking of the swinging scale 
her hand touched, the dust in her eyelids, 
the silent ride back up the hill. I carry the bowl to the table, 
as she lifts her dripping hands from the sink, 
and holds them up, trembling in the light of a kitchen. 
20 
SPRING 
Sometimes I stop at the crosswalk, engine idling, 
and watch the cold wind sweeping dust into the dooiways, 
scattering wax cups and cigarette butts, lifting 
a blue plastic bag high in the air. Sometimes, 
very early or late, I drive right through the light, 
across Georgia Ave without even looking: 
there is no one to see, out in that bone-cracking cold. 
Now, as I sit watching the bright sw1 
reflected in a store-front, I think of ice breaking 
over the creek, water flowing wider the tltin, clear cover. 
An oak leaf that fell on the crystalline surface is released 
back into the current and floats to the mouth of the river. 
Along the shore, mudcats wake in shallow graves 
and break through the softening earth. Stabled horses 
gallop into the pasture, bending their necks 
to the wet grass, swishing their tails at the flies. 
Before the light turns, a man wearing three sweaters 
and a pair ofmunatched boots steps off the curb, 
a paint bucket and wet rag in his hand. He leans 
over the windshield, silently working, chapped face 
inches from mine. He sloshes the glass with gray water 
as I watch him, jaw clenched against the wind, 
through the small circles he is scrubbing. 
21 
MICHELLE KING 
MicheJle King is the BIGGEST cunt. 
I'm sorry to say it says so 
on the wall where they play stickball after school. 
Ten feet high and twice as wide, 
the words are scrawled in yellow spray-paint, 
like home-plate on the asphalt diamond. 
The hulking grade-school 
spilled its children across the playgrow1d 
for the last time last July, 
so there is no shuffiingjanitor, 
no sulking boy kept late 
to scrub her name away. 
There is only me, 
cutting across the blacktop, 
gazing, amazed that they got up there ... 
wondering, 
if she's become a target, 
what a tennis ball is worth, 
that soars the empty schoolyard, 
and caroms off Michelle King, in sho11 left field? 
Home-run or not, 
it's gonna take 
a hook-and-ladder fire-truck 
to save her reputation. 
22 
--=- -
THE REST-STOP 
Past the line 
of traders asleep 
011 their wide-awake mules, 
I come to the oasis 
promised for miles, 
the last gas, food, phone 
in New Jersey. 
The crocodile sunning 
in the booth next to mine 
says love is knowing 
and being known. 
The wart-hog snorts, 
the elephant sighs, the girnffe 
blows smoke through his nose. 
Outside a turtle 
who stopped for a drink 
and fell asleep 
with her lights on, 
the radio playing, 
and the windows 
half..open to the night, 
wakes up 
in her broken-down Nova 
too weak to Jill: 
the thin bone she11 
on her back 
and walk away. 
I see her 
23 
reflected 
in the fish-eyed mirror, 
her long face 
watching mine, 
her stretched neck saying, 
shed your skin 
and move on. 
24 
- - - -? --- ?- ?---~-
COMMUTE 
Out the dirty window of the 42, 
beside the cracking cover of the river, 
the wind clacks through the branches, 
and the over-burdened tree trunks groan. 
I am dreaming again, 
holding a new-born calf in my lap, 
trying to calm the boy, 
who says over and over, 
"It'll never live to Spring, 
Paavo, it'll never live to morning," 
until I wake, too late, my hand 
hanging from the chord, 
the snow out the window 
turned to rain. 
25 
AT THE DINNER PARTY 
The man in the seer-sucker suit says words 
will live longer than Lascaux. His wife believes 
Castro lives in their house, in the picture 
with the palms and marble lions. 
She says they lack everything they need: 
eat fish with a spoon, tempt fate 
with one set of keys. As she speaks, 
the General steps through a door in Havana, 
into the garden, grown higher than she would believe. 
He scratches his long beard, walks under the stars, 
under the tree where her father once sat, 
high in the limbs, legs swinging. 
At the dinner-party, we stand 
on the patio, watching the yellow moon 
through the leaves, our many thoughts 
all turning toward home. 
26 
THE MOBILE 
Half-way up the stairs, 
at the little landing where you turned, 
a mobile hung from an eye-hook in the plaster-
stained glass and mirrors, 
smaJI holes strung with :fishing line. 
In the morning, as the sun rose, 
the b1ight pieces turned on faint currents of air. 
At night, as you slept in different beds, 
on soft sofas and cold floors, 
across the three hard seats of a train, 
it hung in the dark, 
in moonlight slanting through a window, 
casting shadows on the wall. 
There wasn't a day in your life it didn't hang there. 
Somewhere a place you know 
is bull-dozed to the ground: this is how it starts. 
You still smell its smell, and hear its empty sound. 
You feel yourself shuffling down its stairs, 
eyes cast low, unaware of the mobile 
turning behind you in the dusty air. 
27 
MOTION 
A beach at high-tide--
waves breaking and running up the slope 
onto dry sand, touching the skin of a sea-turtle 
as she drags her huge shell back to sea. 
A street-comer where you once stood, 
where you stood many nights like tonight. 
You sip your coffee, read the same words over again, 
as the wind rattles a stop-sign, swirls in a doorway, 
lifting paper cups and stubbed cigarettes. 
A river flowing over stones, jagged slabs 
in the middle, old boulders 
broken into rubble near the shore. 
The river tears itself open and lets the air in-
turning white even in the dark. 
No one could see it on this moonless night, 
ifthere were anyone out there: 
a fisherman gathering his gear, 
au angry boy hurling rocks at the dark. 
You know there is 110 such thing as silence--
a clock always ticks in the background, 
floorboards bend and creak over your bead 
Someone or something raises its voice 
deep in the woods, so faint and distant 
it is not so much a sound as a silent reminder: 
the world continues outside your senses, 
the world has responsibilities besides you. 
A woman stands by the river, 
in a place deep in the woods. 
Far from the bot car on the shoulder, 
28 
she cannot hear the tlucks passing, 
the man cursing over the open hood. 
Her flashlight cuts a circle out of the dark: 
jagged rock, white foam. She kneels 
over an eddy that curls in from the current: 
tadpoles in the light, smooth leeches 
flat on the bottom, a cloud of gnats over the pool. 
The world is made of such small eddies. 
The world is the world because it repeats-
millions of cells move like a woman. 
Particle after particle breaks on the rock. 
If you hold your head still, there is a river-
follow a spot in the water with the flashlight, 
where a leaf floats downstream, 
and that river is gone forever. 
You look absently, for the first and last time, 
at a knot of wood in the table where a girl sat, 
listening to her father, tracing the whorls 
with her small finger, while someone, somewhere else, 
stands in the room of your conception. 
Someday, you will retwn to a house 
having shed every cell of the body 
that lived there, that climbed the trees 
now encased in the bark oft en springs. 
Say the woman on the bank hears a sound, 
far outside her, something insistent. 
Let her return to the dark path, 
lifting the branches away from her face, 
as the man in the car bumps the horn with his fist. 
Let them drive off into the imaginary future, 
their faces lit by the green glow of the dash. 
Let them go-we don 't need them. 
29 
le emptiness 
letter they are gone, 
e the simple truth: 
!eel us, that the river 
'5. 
30 
They existed only to 611 the emptiness 
of the place by the river. Better they are gone, 
better we are alone to face the simple tmth: 
that the world does not need us, that the river 
without witness, continues. 
30 
THREE 
31 
PORTRAIT OF BEIA WALKER WITH BICYCLE 1898 
' 
1bis is before they laid you in your long hole, 
before the women whispered your name like a psalm 
and walked away. Before the worms 
btmowed down to your cwved jaw 
and circled in the sockets of your eyes. 
Almost a century before my grandmother 
pressed your picture in my hand and said 
we favor in the face like brothers. 
You still don't know to walk in the coal mine 
staring at your boots. Don't know that you are not 
the fastest man in Ensley, Alabama. 
You have not seen the crimson bu.th-mark 
on Bobby Taylor's thigh, have not felt 
the buck-shot that will tear holes in your neck 
as you walk, three years later, through the woods 
between your father's house and town, 
certain you can make it home 
before he wakes and finds you 
slouched against the porch-rail, 
suffocating as you bleed to death. 
This is 1898. You are niJ1eteeu. 
Half a second from now you will break this pose 
and walk away, letting go oft he bicycle, 
handing back the borrowed coat and tie. 
You will leave this room forever, 
walk out into the busy street, 
squinting up at the too-bright sky. 
You will notice the rain clouds coming, 
the black umbrellas opening a few blocks down. 
A trolley-car that pulled away, 
moving slow enough for you to nm and catch it, 
just in time to beat the rain, is waiting at the curb. 
32 
You just looked out the dooIWay, 
saw her passing in the street, 
then turned to face the camera, 
as she smiled and looked away. 
This is where the photographer crouched 
beneath the velvet cwtain, this is what he saw: 
my true smile just breaking across yom face, 
my thin lips drawn tight, 
as you think about her body, the smell 
ofh er bare breasts, the pores in her skin. 
This is when the flash dust sparks and rises, 
when the ashes are frozen in the air; 
the shutter opens, and light pours into this room 
from a room in Ensley, Alabama, 
where yom rough coat-sleeves 
hang down around my wrists, 
where your white necktie is tight around my neck. 
My back is stiff from standing, 
my tongue is dry against yom teeth, 
and your fingers, curled arow1d the handlebars, 
brush the soft skin of my palms. 
33 
THE LAST DA Ys 
There were more every day the water rose, 
sitting as you know they do, if you've seen them-
in the highest branches, 
patient as priests in black robes. 
They came from the hollows, 
below the water-line, where the trees 
not cut and hauled to mills 
were under tlte Chattahoochee, 
branching in the green water, 
lifting the bright backs of their leaves in the current, 
moving as the wind had blown them. 
People hardly had time to notice, much less 
to find a rifle and shoot one. They were busy 
can-ying things out into the yard, 
loading furniture and pictures 
and bw1dles of clothes onto the truck, 
praying against the rising water. 
They tore the house apa1t 
with a crow-bar and a sledge, 
making a stack oflumber for rebuilding, 
a stack of lumber to be bume d. 
Because they didn't know what else to do, 
the children skipped rocks 
and combed the muddy bank for treasure. 
From high above, you would have seen them, 
34 
a small boy washing a rock at the river's edge, 
and a skinny girl, talking to herself, 
wearing a black feather in her hair. 
35 
TWO DREAMS 
Beside me, 
you lie back down, 
your voice creeping 
back into the room 
from a dream. 
Your moan turns 
to thwider in my sleep, 
your face 
into a snow-cloud 
high above me 
in the winter sky, 
and your pulse 
the steady crunching 
of my boots. 
In the morning, 
as we lie togetb,~r, 
I will sing the tune 
they're playing 
by the fire here, 
a slow waltz 
that fills the room 
But tonight, deair, 
I must hurry J10me, 
across the frozen lake, 
chancing a jig on the ice, 
as the sad fiddle 
that echoes 
through tl1ese woods 
starts up again. 
36 
CATCH 
TI1e catfish, 
that stm1tuer, 
sucking air 
thick with heat 
that drove us 
to water 
and him to 
our line, set 
deeper than 
usual, 
did not look 
much like a 
cat to me. 
My Granddad 
did not let 
me see his 
old grin when 
he left 111e 
watching th~ 
bucket of 
fin s and slick 
skin and Joug 
black barbs, to 
get the cracked 
ax handle 
from the shed, 
which he came 
back squeezing 
in his fist. 
He kicked the 
37 
chwning pail 
and spilled the 
fish out on 
the soggy 
nver grass, 
and I knew 
they both knew 
more than I 
what came next. 
38 
TO MY BROTHER, REMEMBERED 
It is late, 
the moon floating on the water, 
the wann breeze carrying the voices of men 
fishing wider the bridge, the lanterns 
rising and falling on the 
horizon ... 
I remember 
my brother treading water, 
just his face above the surface, impatient 
for me to jump from the mud bank 
as he has done, 
just now, 
holding tight 
to the knot on the rope, 
skimming across the water and rising into the sky, 
his big toe touching the leaf on the Jimb before he let go 
and flips like a hatchet, 
down into the 
water. 
The black lake 
takes the wet clay under my heels, 
and again I am rising into the air, the rope tangled 
around my waist, the bum snaking 
across my skin as I fell 
through the deep air, 
down into the 
water. 
I imagine 
39 
the sun throwing spears of Jight 
into the dark, imagine the oJd dock above me, 
the thin beach towels, the radio, and the bottles of coconut oil 
lined up beside my sister, squinting into her book. 
I can hear her 
squealing at the splash 
ofmy brother diving in, as I lose my breath 
and pull towards the light, meeting half-way up IJjs boyhood face, 
smiling into mine, blowing silver tubes oflaughter 
out into the water 
as we pass. 
40 
CHATTAHOOCHEE 
The fish moves like a spirit 
through the flower of moonlight 
hanging in the water, 
through the depth that never warms, 
where bass and catfish wallow in the dark, 
where you can almost see 
the impossible bottom of the man-made lake. 
The black bass with the burning tongue 
dives, dividing the green dark 
pressing water through the feathered tissue of its gills. 
Curl after curl rises from my reel, 
the glowing filament pulled 
through the square 
of a window frame, arow1d the rotten bowl 
of a tree-stump, over the msted g1i1l 
of a '53 Lincoln, half-buried in mud. 
Below, clear fins fan the water, 
and above the long note of my voice 
whispers to the dark, asking the fat bass to rise, 
as I wind in a foot, give back a yard. 
The fish sends messages in faint vibrations: 
from a landscape darker 
than the moon.less night over the water. 
With one finger on the line I feel 
41 
the whittled shape of things 
dropped by the living, and the flaking remains 
of the dead. My rod bends 
over the water, near breaking- raising 
a dented mailbox orange with rust, 
a muscle-covered fence-post, 
or the limb of a pine where a tire once hWJg, 
barely moving all afternoon on the breeze .. . 
And then, what was lost is gone again, 
the fish swimming free, the sunken junk-yard 
increased by the size and weight 
of an old lure from my tackle-box, 
its silver spoon spinning to the cloudy bottom, 
as I wind the snapped line back 
onto the dripping spool, 
slack as a fallen kite-string. 
2 
The ribbon of micro-film whirs 
from one plastic reel to the other, 
and the summer of 1953 passes 
in a moment. It is September. 
Sorghum Crowe stands in his yard, 
turning an iron crank, 
raising a bucket through his reflection 
at the cool, round bottom of the well. 
In the distance, the afternoon sw1 glares 
on what can only be the Chattahoochee-
42 
before the dam, when the river snaked 
between tall hills, deepening the valley. 
Tue gaunt face in the foregrow1d is white 
as the projector's bare bulb. He wears the stiff clothes 
and stubbled anger of a farmer, 
looking sideways at the photographer, frozen 
as if half-listening to us still. 
In the next frame, at a table, he signs the deed 
to the last tract ofland in the flood-plain, 
the last acquisition required. He scratches his name 
and the future is silently born 
outside in the bright afternoon. Soon, 
the absurd churches, jacked onto flat-beds, 
will inch down the narrowing road, out of town. 
Tue concrete gates of the dam will close slowly, 
and the men will begin their vigil over the river, 
marking its iise on the thick stilts of Brown' s Bridge, 
gathe1ing at the widening edge, 
their shimmeiing faces reflected: quiet, compliant. 
But nothing in this dead face says 
he ever mourned the past- though the living deny it-
nothing says he knew the meaning of his life 
any more than I do, the importance 
of its moments as they happen. He sold everything 
and built a house up the mountain, where he sits in his age, 
gently rocking, watching the calm surface of the lake, 
so smooth and opaque on summer evenings 
it looks frozen in the light- perfectly still 
43 
until the wet slap of a jumping fish 
breaks the water' s wide silence. 
3 
The story is always told as comedy: 
the man who died for twenty dollars 
would've done it for less. In stiff overalls 
and a wide-brimmed hat, whorls of gray beard 
on his neck and face, he crouches in the yard, 
burying a jar under the magnolia. 
He stamps on the mound, smoothes it with his shoe. 
There is movement, of course, 
from order to disorder: the dammed river 
rising higher than expected, flooding the house, 
the dusty barn, the blossoming magnolia. 
He wades down the porch-steps 
like a baptist, the muddy water darkening his pants, 
filling his pockets with flecks of mica, 
as he swims-head-up, neck straining 
like a dog- looking hopelessly 
for the place where he kicked the shovel, 
where the light should be, 
the glint of the pickle jar rising 
somehow, miraculously, floating up 
through the muddy Chattahoochee. 
The river fills the house to the windows, 
sloshes the walls like dirty bathwater. 
He takes a Jong breath, dives, and is gone. 
44 
In the end, it is a small act, 
one part of a longer story. One of many deaths 
that pass each day, without stopping the flood, 
his long white body 
a creature of the water. 
Only the living need it to mean 
anything, something spiritual in the physics 
of buoyancy- volume and mass. 
For us, there is always a message 
in the swirling eddy, a track to find before moving on. 
Let the blue-white skin of the man in the liver 
tell us something then, 
as his body, stripped bare, floats away: 
that our oldest animal instinct is the need 
to find the things we bury, 
to come back later and dig up our bones. 
4 
The wind blows 
through the window, 
lifting a white sash 
the way a mother admires a gown ... 
The water moves 
through the lock, draining slowly, 
exposing foot by foot 
the slick red walls of a gorge 
45 
dotted with stumps all the way down. 
fu a moment, the water drops 
lower than the longest drought, 
and the twisted figures of pine trees emerge 
like the starved prisoners on the news, 
stepping into a light that blinds them. 
Slick trunks and bare branches, funed thick 
with algae, hung everywhere with drooping sacks 
of fish-eggs, heavy fiuit transparent in the light. 
Like everything dying, the lake reverts 
to what it was, becoming a river, 
settling slowly into its sandy banks. 
Like someone knee-deep in snow, 
I climb down the mud-thick hill, hop-sliding 
all the way down to the level bottom. 
Uncut forest, wider the water for years-
dead trees soft as flesh, 
branches shining like black snakes. 
Whole oaks bend to my touch, 
their trunks nodding to the ground. 
I follow what looks like a path 
by the river, where people walked 
from one cabin to the next. The hot breeze blows 
the smell of dead fish all around me, 
the layers of algae beginning to rot. fu the last moment 
before waking, I stand at the bottom of the lake, 
hea1ing my breath, like an astronaut 
wieasy on the surface of the moon. Beside me, 
46 
a green chimney stands as it has for decades 
simply displacing what sun-ow1ds it, ' 
planted like the impossible flag 
of those here before me. 
5 
I wake Vvith my face pressed hard into the planks. 
With one eye open, I can see them circling 
in the blue sky, as they must have been doing 
since dami: looking for food, looking 
through tlie black eyes set in their bloody faces 
at the whole valley laid out- the crooked line 
of the shore, the rolling hills quilled with pines, 
and the small square of the dock, 
gently rising and falling on the surface. 
They have come for the bodies of the dead, 
and if thern are no dead, to wait for the living. 
They glide patiently, more ce1tain of their purpose 
than any creature, any hunter who cannot know, 
as they do, what will come, 
that what always comes wilJ come this time too. 
They gather over the dead and near-dead: fonning 
a circle over the dog on the highway, 
a circle over the calf in the pasture, 
a circle over the bloated oposswn floating in the lake. 
They knoVv the changed walk of the maimed, 
the jaundiced eye of the snake-bit, 
the Ulllilistakable stagger of the newly-born, 
47 
--, 
because it is their life, their place: to carry us 
over the water, over the trees and smoking chimneys, 
to their roost at the mouth of the creek, 
where the snake and the mouse come together 
in their black wings, where the fox and the squin-el 
become feathers in their breasts-
where even the dead vulture heaped by the shore 
is changed from feathers into feathers: 
the broken wing straightened, the Ciushed shards of beak 
reassembled, the clotted sockets of eyes filled again 
with the sight of brothers and sisters, 
perched on the scaned limbs of the pine. 
High over the rotting dock 
the hWigry return to their tree, 
bringing the scattered pieces of the dead 
back together, the black livers, tom fingers, 
and vacant eyes of the dead, 
carried in the full mouths of the living. 
48