Allatoona Storm

                      for Edward Hirsch

The sun had crossed the wide lake. Thunderstorms every afternoon
for a week, and now black clouds mobbing again over the distant marina
where one jinxed bass boat jerked at its rope.

In the book in my lap a pyramid was being stacked, stone by stone,
in a desert:. Tons of limestone on sledges,
ramps, ropes, the grinding timbers,
                                                  unthinkable human misery...
I scratched my head at the lives wasted on immortality.

And in Egypt, it said, no historical evidence for the presence of the Jews.
No plagues then, no exodus, no forty years kicking around
in the wilderness—
                            so forget about the walls of the parted Red Sea
crushing Pharaoh's chariots, startling as it was in Technicolor.

Sure, they had the facts. It was history, archaeology.
And from there I might've quibbled with plenty of lovely pictures
in my illustrated Old Testament—
                                                   the ostrich following the elephant
into the clumsy ark, the bolting prophet in the belly of the fish—

but the sun over the lake was slicing through the clouds
in such a miraculously thin veil,
                                               and the rose trellis lifted to the thunderbolts
the waxy faces of penitents, and all evening
the stooped magnolia, leaves gray as sackcloth, trembled...

Kenny Roebuck's Knuckle-Curve

Slow and goofy as the kid himself, it rises out of crowd-noise and memory,
wobbles off the mound in a long jerky float
                                                                   like the face of a drunk
coming out of a bar, luminous under streetlights,
rising, dipping, weaving,
                                    hovering over sidewalk and oily street,
closer, closer, until gradually you see it's a face
you know, a face
you've mourned in the mirror—
                                               stitched, battered, scarred—
the very mug of failure, but floating now in hard-won abandon,
lost to the world, recklessly at peace,
easy to swat as a saint,
                                    and you rock back, swing,
and it hops, weaves, jerks,
rockets at your crotch, and once again the world isn't what you think,
and the memory, already wobbling, knuckles off
into voices, laughter, jeers,
                                         that sobering pop of the catcher's mitt.

The Undertaker

Where could he go after the showroom emptied at Holcomb Chevrolet
and the doors on the service garage
                                                      clanged down for good?
Only the street of small shops and drugstores, only a gas station
or a grocery — or that one sprawling house
at the head of Main, where he'd learn to dress and powder the dead.

No one wanted this. Not my mother, not me.
We knew they'd follow him home. clinging like dust to his shadow.
They smelled like formaldehyde,
                                                 sardines. stale tobacco.
They left a film my mother couldn't sweep away;
It stuck to our shoes. Made us edgy, tearful.
                                                    _____

Sharp words flew, toast burned, the laundry scorched.
But slowly, as we grew used to the dread, the intensity
of the shadows flooding the house.
everything else intensified also—
                                                his brutal hugs in the evening.
my mother's silence crackling into laughter,
the vivid sizzle of bacon on the stove, the purple violets
in our jelly glasses. It wasn't just spring, I know that,
or the freshly scrubbed windows, or the sunlight turning orange
through the rusted screens—
                                           it was those guests
we couldn't coax home, forever darkening some comer,
sheepish, nervous,
                             desperate to be offered a chair.

Melville in the Bass Boat

                                           ...meditation and water are wedded for ever.

Three hours I drifted the black cove, throwing deep runners, live shiners,
rattle-bugs and jigs,
                              a Vienna sausage, a pickle,
a mustard-soaked sardine, and for all my stealth and trickery,
failed to conjure
one small mystery caged in the bones of a fish.

                                                                          Never mind,
there was a book in the bottom of the boat, a paperback, slightly soggy,
and I propped the rod and primed die lantern.
                                                                         Over the oily lake
the stars burned only a little dimmer, though soon
I glowed in a buoy of light.

Wind off the open water, and wave-slap. Boat-drift
and the tiny Pequod, fat-sailed,
                                               "plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic."

                                                     _____

Sizzle of crickets, cicadas harping from the far pines,
and occasionally out of that directionless dark,
                                                                       one curious owl quizzing
those nameless voices of the cove.

Over the blending rhythms of water and word,
over "that deep, blue, bottomless soul,"
                                                         how easily the mind drifts...
Then spark and slap of the dream-fish, leaping far out, like a thought,
and the felt vibration in the nerve,
                                                  that trembling to know, to take
another crack at whatever might surface — that mind-flash,
that "ungraspable phantom of life,"
                                                  that. bony metaphor.

David Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was selected by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.  He is the author of six other books of poetry and two novels.  Among his many other awards are the Levison and the Frederick Bock Prizes of Poetry, an Ingram Merrill Award, and Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.   He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, where he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University.  He is Poet Laureate of Georgia.

The above poems are republished from David Bottoms' latest book, Waltzing through the Endtime (Copper Canyon Press; 2004)

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