And Ever

You rise

to watch the leaves

breathe light to their edges

and burn,

drawing day from the night

to wake the birds.

You’ve learned this sound,

white chord of a filling lung

that will set the wren to sing,

so you rise

only today

it isn’t leaves—

it’s a moth you’ve never seen,

its wings

not flock, not felt,

but paper—

hundreds, thousands

of photographs

flickering in your breath

then falling,

each into its own light,

another pair of wings.

~

Now the windows switch,

Wallace incandescent

in the schoolhouse door,

Kennedy at his desk.

The children curl

in the broadcast’s glow,

and beyond, silhouettes drift,

blotting fireflies from the night.

It hasn’t rained for weeks,

and everyone is looking

for something to fall.

The airfield strobes planes

from the night.

Leaves pocket

the carhop’s music.

And honeysuckle yawns

till everything smells like breath.

Dust settles

on the sleeping faces,

as headlights sweep,

tires hush the drive.

As the moth on the window

folds to a bullet,

then unfolds

to watch again.

                 ~

~

Then the light

is as fine as dust,

dust a moth strews

as it lights on the screen,

that falls on the face

like honeysuckle’s musk.

Eyes flutter

the dust to angels

and the room

is a heaven,

throngs flocked

from the closet’s sleeves

to the window

and out into the dim

where they hang

their trumpets in the vines.

They call through the crickets’

ever and ever,

then silk themselves

in question marks

beneath the leaves.

~

Or the light

is weak as a candle’s,

swelling, then cooling

as you reach

for those unnamable wings.

Touch,

and they fan over the grass,

the yard’s a writhe of flashlights,

fireflies when there shouldn’t be,

dozens now luminous

in the fractured air.

Drift, shrivel,

they whet,

they hang themselves

in the honeysuckle

then bore deeper

into the leaves.

~

the sleep they’ve gathered

in their eyes,

sleep that has forgotten you.

lilac his shirt forgot.

The perfect sleeves,

the shirts you ironed

he said he wouldn’t need.

The closet’s furl

until the shadow gutters

into the shoes,

into dust,

until you find

a breath

of yesterday’s breath.

Somewhere here is an inch of cloth

light has not faded,

color not beaten white

by sun.

You look and then you’re

gripping the sill

in that moment

when everything glows a little,

when the light is everywhere

and there are no shadows,

~

The brother’s face

at the airplane window.

And the dream again.

Willie Tingle,

their father’s friend,

those hands,

broad day,

closing on his skin.

His face

as they bind him to the cart

and drag him

through Decatur’s streets.

The field

where they tie him to a post.

His face

as they lash the shirt away.

As they tie the noose.

As they walk away.

They leave the shirt,

a shadow to outlive.

The hum of the body,

or its absence,

its sprawl.

The name

in the field he walks each day

with Medgar,

the only way to school.

Now he walks alone

through the damp clay of night

to watch moon soak

into the shirt’s easing folds,

to watch moon crust

then flake into wings.

Light like a blind man’s fingers

reading everything.

~

Then morning is dust

engrained in light’s trajectories,

shirts that pollen

when you move.

Everything escapes us—

why we opened closets, doors,

what we said,

faces too bright to see.

Dust would settle

to flock the wings of touch,

lint would rise

if anyone was looking

when the shell is lifted,

the print peeled from the glass,

though to see is to know

everything as aftermath,

not the window

but the bore,

not the oil but the cotton

in the bullet’s grooves,

plaque of light

on everyone’s skin.

~

Soon the day will unfold its cruelties

and someone will have said

and someone will have written

Maybe this will slow them down.

Then everyone can read it,

and the bright faces

will fold like curtains

and leave you at the window

once again.

There,

the moth is spreading.

Lean close enough

and you can see

Medgar, fallen to the drive,

house key in his outstretched hand.

Lean closer,

while the paper’s turning,

while the light is bruising

to a dozen children caged in wire,

their fingers

all you see at first,

and then the dark equator

that halves their eyes,

the jagged latitude of pines

that swallows the last ash

and embers of the day.

Closer, now,

the weave of each child’s shirt

is opening.

The cotton, the paper

swallow all the light.

                 ~

~

And after day has staled

like a glass of water beside the bed,

after morning’s gone,

what does anyone remember?

Nectar. Sweat.

The river’s musk

neither a history

nor a promise of rain.

Honeysuckle’s

the only breathing thing.

Children file with their flags

down the streets

and their flags are taken,

and they are taken,

from the street to the wagon,

from the wagon to the pen,

and the street is left to darken

the way the sky never will.

If anyone is missing

check the fairgrounds first,

check the cages they made

to hold them all.

Check the bushes and the vacant lots.

Someone ran away.

Something rustled in the vines

where they found the rifle

and a fingerprint so sweetgum-sharp

someone will know its tree.

Someone saw an empty car

in the drive-in lot,

the kind of white

that talks through the night to the moon.

The moon was failing and someone

turned as the t.v. cooled

to see the president’s ghost

in the dimming tube.

A cab trawled the neighborhood,

a telegram or a passenger to unfold.

A man at the depot

read a phone book to the air,

and somewhere in the night

a radio played the speech again

and someone laughed

at one hundred years of delay

and someone stayed late

for the picture show.

and at the end when the ship was burning

and the theater filled with smoke

a moth rose into the light

and came apart in the air.

                 ~

~

Whatever falls

falls quietly

into the wool of breath,

into the handkerchief

or the sleeve.

An eyelash.

A tear.

Drops of sweat

to suggest the withheld rain.

And whatever falls

falls through the temple’s boiling air,

switch of paper fans

and photographs

and the strobes

that hold your face a moment,

first one cheek,

then the other. . .

And whatever falls

falls quietly

into the eulogy

he hadn’t wanted

because those who give them

never mean them,

into the newsreels’ whispers,

into the scent of gladiolas

and the stink of film

which is the smell of memory

as it leaves you,

given like a pollen.

Its flowers

write themselves

into your fingers

and become a part of everything

you touch.

The arms that hold you

when you leave the temple,

the hands,

the crowded air.

~

forbidden hymn

that needs to break

What follows is the hush of cloth,

the silent march

down Lynch Street

and across the tracks

where policemen thicken

on the white side of town,

then Farish

where every window

is a book of eyes,

faces, noise.

Crew-cut teens and jukebox blare

in a drugstore’s door

till someone pulls the plug

so the wish of pants legs and skirts

can fill the street again.

~

Later the song will break,

one voice, then another,

this little light of mine,

then dozens, hundreds running

all over Capitol Street,

I’m gonna let it shine

on the riot squad’s

bright helmets.

And later, the man in the paper

with a bandaged skull

and a shirt torn to gauze,

a room of song behind him,

will be pulled from a building

and beaten again

and thrown in the fairgrounds’ cages

with trucks of other mourners.

But for now his is just one of the faces

waiting as the coffin’s drawn

into the funeral home,

where the wood is polished,

where the flag is tucked

for the ride to Washington,

just one of the faces

the bearers can see

through the curtains,

the shirt

just one of thousands

now blistering in the sun.

                 ~

~

They’re waiting in their Sunday bests

when the hearse arrives,

knowing somehow

he would be coming,

crowding the platform

when the caisson rolls into the frame

with the flag-draped coffin,

turned away

toward the schedule

that tells how long they have.

When the train is boarded,

they crowd the window

where the women sit

with the flag

and as the station pulls away,

as town gives way

to field, even in the thickets

they’re there, their shirts,

their hats and dresses

flowering the blur,

and in Tuscaloosa

and Birmingham and Anniston

turning the stations into churches,

knowing somehow he would be coming.

Whenever they wake,

they are there—

impossible to see them all,

waiting like water

in the trampled fields,

like shards of moon

in the evening’s failures,

glass that gathers

the fugitive light.

And even now

as dust lays its unclosable wings

on the faces of the sleeping,

as it settles into the breath

and the tangles of vine,

the window’s bore,

the kitchen’s pale seizures of light,

even now,

as she looks again,

glowing soft as honeysuckle’s lamps,

as moths against the glass.