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After my mother and father fight, my father takes my hand and we walk down to the Mississippi where he smokes Camel cigarettes. He flicks his ashes away from me. He rarely says my name. All day on TV, I watch monks in Saigon douse themselves in gasoline and light their saffron robes on fire. When they ignite, they do not cry out. I study their silence to comprehend how a tongue turns into flame.
Poem from The Clerk’s Tale, reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Company
Oh people not mine
what is it we can hear
the old custodian
coddles the tin box
in the empty church
the ex-monk clips
his lime tree just so
my soiled skin flensed
from my uniform
Jesus said to them
Still singing in my cell
of succulents, staked by a man
who fled. Nothing personal.
How often I get that wrong…
I move on—
some man
is always fleeing, and that
is never personal. The longer
I go the fewer notes I need.
My torso a sort of hotel.
Martyrdom bores me.
My hook-ups a new flamenco—
will I be saved?
The peninsula tilts its goblets.
I am alone.
Wasn’t I always?
Swifts fleck the dry grass.
By my absence you’ll know me.
I was a full-time house sitter. I had no title. I lived in a farmhouse, on a small hill, surrounded by 100 acres. All was still. The fields were in a government program that paid farmers to abandon them.