Flood

(Houston, Texas, 2001)

Where have all the night tunes fled?

The thrum of locusts, those tin blossoms I loved

To hear ratchet and uncoil

                                       and swivel down from the cypress trees,

Are long gone, gone with the freight trains

Slogging through the humidity,

                                             their shadowchurn over

The tarred trestles, their castanets of wood and air and steel.

And the distant drone of the diesel rigs

Unspooling like bolts of muslin over the rooftops;

And the faint winglisp of Japanese beetles

Coasting the open window,

rappelling up the wall,

Dizzy for that place where the light sprouts.

All of it gone, the night's music silenced

And sluiced through the oily gutters,

Into the yawning storm drains clotted

With trash and mud and drowned birds.

Gone and irretrievable, like a few stray eyelashes

Shed by a nightswimmer

diving through the dark into darker water.

~

City of forgotten history, where are your dead?

What locks has the rain picked? What dark is this

That silences your cylinders, clicks shut

Your six black moons?

So much undone and rising,

The water thighdeep and spreading like iodine,

Scything the manicured lawns, jostling the shotgun shacks,

Rattling the irongates and razorwire.

Rising over the capsized dumpsters,

Over the little-league fields and playgrounds,

Over the jukeboxes and convenience stores and hospitals,

While the poor ride their flimsy housing

down like sheetrock dinghies.

And the homebound traffic submerged,

Frozen in orbit on the interstate

Where the radios warble and bleed beyond earshot.

And the light we hold onto growing cold.

And the light slipping piecemeal below the surface,

This fluid scaffolding, these ghostly constellations

Blurring out of reach beneath the water.

~

It's the rain that calls me out and the night

That anchors me here like a stone.

The night, impenetrable, a layer of charcoal

Sheeting the bottom of a water purification tank.

The night and the silence beneath water.

The silence that we're all being swept towards.

Who will remember us? What will I remember?

Once, when I was sixteen and death didn't exist,

When it didn't follow me as it does now,

This thin, persistent whine behind my left ear,

I shucked my clothes beside the tracks

And stumbled across a soot-glazed trestle.

I listened to the pigeons rustle on the ledge

And felt the vodka slide beneath my skin

As I spread my arms to summon devils and angels,

The dumb-luck and know-not-what that got me there.

I stood on the edge of some undefined space

Where trees, washed in adrenaline,

Ceased to be trees, and the single blue feather

That floated down in front of me,

Just out of reach, held the only light

I thought I'd ever need. When I jumped

The water was no longer

Water, but a doorway, and language a mere

Afterthought filling the room my body carved

With its headlong tumble.

If I could, I'd plunge again into that weightlessness.

I'd shake this undertow from around my ankles

And sink to where the salamander skulls

Lisp their sandy refrains, where the leeches lurk

Among crack pipes and tires and stray shoes.

There where the fire ants refuse

To die, their bodies rising like bubbles

Through the murky corridors.

I'd follow the water moccasins and catfish,

Gather the coins tarnishing

In the gator mouths and swim to the concrete's edge

Where sewage and gasoline scallop the pylons,

Where the names of lovers

Are scrawled in the shadows and the homeless cling

To cardboard signs. If I could,

I'd hollow their words out and drag the lost

Faces up from the depths.

But the flood's erased the shore, smeared

The messages like octopus ink.

And somewhere behind the clouds

The stars remain, igniting the dark's amnesia.

~

From the driveway's edge, I watch the water

River the street,

                        sliding and eddying past,

Rising at the intersection where it boils

Into a gluttonous gray-foam,

Biting at the stopsigns and telephone poles,

Spitting its flotsam out, its scum and bones.

And all night I'll worry up the stunned

Rattlesnakes, the uncorked manholes,

The water's chemical sheen and the silence

Swimming like an endless wind beneath it.

And all night I'll worry their names

Out of the rain,

                       Driftwood and Horseshoe,

Lumbrera Tremeda and Fuego Sempiterno.

I could launch a thousand newsprint boats

Into the eye of the storm to bless them,

Fill the hulls with brand new pennies

To grant them luck. I could climb the trees

With my plastic lantern and light their way,

There where the leaves whisper the inaudible

Into the swamped night's tincan.

~

I lie in bed for a long time before drifting

Into sleep, listening to a helicopter

Circling the city, to the silence that lifts

Like a broken buoy inside its whop.

With my eyes closed I can almost imagine

The faint sound of its spotlight sliding

Over the water, over the mirrored facades

Of the skyscrapers. A sound as precise

As a broom sweeping the linoleum floor

Of the barbershop at closing time

When the barber is alone, as he has been

At the end of each day for twenty-six years.

When he finishes, he removes his smock

And stands smoking, watching the news

On an old television. The gray dusk

Has softened the lines on his face,

Just as it's softened the chrome chairs

Behind him and the headlights of the cars

On the interstate going nowhere now

And the curses of their drivers. Soon

They're pushing the doors open with their feet,

The water and the night pouring through,

Indistinguishable, filling the floorboards

In one funneling gasp, the way grain

Swirls and spills from an exhausted silo

Into the sunlight and dust of summer.

Although they never describe it such

To the bystanders and reporters.

It happened so fast, they say, shivering.

It happened so fast . . . I hardly remember anything.

And the barber, believing their words

Are already rain and broken glass,

Clicks off the set and turns to the window,

Watching the drops weave and thread

The letters of his name, his face blank

As he stares past everything

Trying to remember what it is he's lost.

What could I say that he won't already understand

When he finds himself standing alone

In the dark, listening to the wind come again

And again, the rain running off

The awning, the sound of water rising?

~

A dream of flood in the midst of flood.

The water goes where it wants and I follow it

Through the drowned streets and alleys,

Through greased cavernous canals of parking garages,

Through unhinged doors and shattered windows,

Up elevator shafts and down hallways.

Telephone lines fishtail and fizz.

Dead letters ride up

and out of the blue breath of mailboxes.

In a hospital basement, cages bob like lobster traps,

The shaved pink bellies of rats bloating

Against the wire mesh, the bright tips

Of unsheathed syringes

snicking a code against steel and glass.

Somewhere a lone cello floats calmly

Across a playground of my childhood,

As if the world had never known its music,

As if it had never been anything else

But an empty boat. It docks against

The top of a swingset where crows roost,

Lifting their faces into the wind.

What I remember is water and then

No water, the earth spongy

                                        as I kneel beneath

The swing, beside the hole scooped out

Long ago by my gliding feet.

There in a shallow pool tadpoles

Squirm in the mudsuck, hundreds of black

Commas I cup in my hands and carry

To the bank of the swollen creek.

I wait a long time for the cries of their kind

To rise from the rocks and crushed grass.

~

Dawn, and the first sunlight in days,

Mustard-pale and seeping

Through the last of the broken storm bands

Scudding west like a fleet of ashy rafts.

I open the window and the morning air's

Steeped with the smell of mold,

Sewage, rotting fish, and something

Unidentifiable: thousands of mosquito eggs

Taking root in the mud, perhaps,

Or the musky scent of night crawlers writhing

In blind ecstasy on the sidewalk and in the grass.

I could say, now is the time to start over.

I could say, now is the time to pick up the pieces and move forward,

But some good soul says it and means it

When the smoky rasp of a chainsaw

Flares up and ricochets

Through the narrow spaces between homes,

And then the deep, intermittent

Chortle of a generator and pump, and the whine

Of an outboard in the distance

Ferrying people and pets and supplies.

I want to say, this is the music of beginning again,

When a face on the news stops me.

He stands there holding it for a long time,

Watching the water empty out

Of its lace skirt and bodice. He doesn't look up,

Not even when the reporter thrusts

The microphone beneath his chin.

He stands staring at the dress,

And before I can speak I'm gone with him

To the place where he last remembers it,

Unzippered and crumpled at the bottom of a skiff

Shored where the cattails bow along the bank,

A half-mile down river from the wedding feast.

The stars never so close and silent as this,

As he and his new wife swim, the water

So black and warm against their bodies the world

Seems to be springing forth

For the first time out of the dark,

Out of their footprints pressed in silt,

Out of the willlowroots and stones and snakegrass.