Five
Poems
by Holly Pettit |
Author's Links |
Watery Pemba Coast of West Africa, 1996 When Shell found the barque offshore (unsure they'd found anything worth sending their own people for, yet wary of trusting anyone here among the fragmenting government, warring gangs, tribes, the Church,) they called on the Jesuit school -- order's refuge -- and the school sent a boy running with a letter to me. I made my first dive for them on the first day of autumn, with borrowed tanks, a waterproof pad on which to sketch diagrams, and a plastic camera. Fourteen miles out thirty meters down I found what the Oil Men sought shouldering her way out of a rift -- a flat-bottomed junk of heartwood timber broken open. Spilling, still. Porcelain cups and bowls -- unboxed by rot and pocked with crustaceans yet translucent as teeth, glowing as I brushed at clumps of algae. Suddenly that week Wife began waking early, frying big breakfasts. All my education finally brought her some good! No longer married to the bookish idiot she donned a different self, talked about the pay money as she flattened dough in her palms, laid patties down in grease as she invested in me market gossip and funny things that happened yesterday. But our brief Eden ended. The very next Monday morning I carried the tanks, brought a lunch tied in a plastic bag around my waist, but the catwalk was chained. A blonde intern paid me on the dock and sent me home. University men had arrived from England, it seemed, began making the dives as I, unable to stop myself, slunk every noon down to the water, joined my chattering neighbors in front of the fence to watch. The English told us Stand back, don't get so close We could fall in, delay the operation with a call for rescue -- natives can't swim they've been told, it's for our own good so Stand Back. The neighbors complained, but I worried: What did these English see with their inner eyes? Could they see the bonfires on these narrow beaches, treasure-laden embassies to a red-walled city? Chinese approached this coast a thousand years ago, entreated a King to trade with their square-sailed ships of no keel and no pitch, joined only by rope and water the wood took on that swelled the seams tight so that each vessel took within itself and sailed for a time upon the agent of its own destruction. Even now when I go home to lie down I cannot sleep without sinking again meter upon meter unto the sandy floor, to pull at algae with my hands, sketch on a stranger's rubberized pad the primitive dimensions of my wreckage. Dana's Boy She named him Wilder, not for a war hero, grandfather, but for a movie, after a director, to lay for the boy a straight road west out of the tight Yankee Saltbox of their inherited name. Every word has a topography though, and she couldn't hear it -- that high fence "Wile," the gully "Dur," both stretched across internal marshes, dividing sky and land with sanded washes, barbed wire and rotted wood unseen in her imagination or from the air. Throwback Wilderness came home the way he came out, the way all Covington babies come out -- angry crimson one side, wizened gray the other -- a demarcation line down the forehead extending the length of the torso (if the shirt is lifted it can be shown) and in the skull the division can be found with the fingertips, a rift beneath the skin in the bone. His folks had the name before he came out, before they saw, before the old people made it clear that the forgotten could still make itself known, could not be shaken free of -- Wilderness had been made a marker. His body touched by the Recording Angel in passing and he, newest born throwback of a wild, tribal folk, would soon recite history, symbol tree bark, pattern new walls with newsprint, soot, and stone, dance the clatter of rattlesnake bones. Even in infant slumber he was a vision of battlefields, the walking of woods, of hiding places and burial mounds, the kenning of where not to step, what was owned, where boundaries had been broken, and the fingerprint of the blood god who accompanied the break. Celibacy Thinking on it again he knew if he ever seriously thought about it as possible -- that peculiar shape of mouth she had, such an improbable little purse -- he would be lost. The weight would shift across his shoulders, bring load and bearer over and down the craggy face of a well-mapped, unclimbed mountain. Private Perry's Last Day in Russian Defense Language School, Monterey, California His long, chessboard plucking-up-pieces fingers dangle, clutching chalk and stirring dusty air. The sun breaks through, lights the floorboards, glinting off grit, steaming. Dubrakoff begins again. The paragraph is complex, many reflexives, subjunctives, and the future pluperfect. Ramirez's tongue is a languid Chicago Latina, translates Gogol into an English that sets the whole room reeling on a noontime drunk. Dubrakoff coughs, rubs a hand across the back of his collar where his hair gaps. Taller than any of his little soldiers, sailors, his gaze falls across the one pale blue morning-sick Airman, Lori Scarpetta, hiding in the back left corner. She'll never make it, never. Pluperfect? She manages an auction house "no." Moment -- he says, presses forefinger to lip -- Step back, and take in the sentence as a whole, like a painting, not an equation, not a rule you look up but a lyric. You remember the words. Pluperfect! -- he swings and points, Private Perry! -- yes, you know this! Private Perry! The guns are leveled at you now. "She would have died. She had died? She was dying?" |
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