Listening to Tony Earley in Idaho
Across Lake Pontchartrain, past the curled
carcass of a water moccasin,
the ibis and flamingo marsh,
past tin-roofed, ramshackle,
screenless shacks, she says,
Look. The moon hangs in the bare branches
of the live oak, black tropical sky,
bed the size of a small fiefdom.
Oh sure, the desk clerk says.
Ghosts live everywhere.
My mind goes.
The gleaming bald head,
two points of light like white eyes,
alone onstage but for a grand
piano draped in an olive green cozy.
It was that picture we saw today,
she says. The woman in the silk dress,
white blur against the darker lawn.
By the poster that said,
I got laid in N’Awlins.
Like a petroleum engineer
forced to dowse, he hates felt overshoes,
magnetometers, spectroscopes,
cameras, cheap microphones,
séances, psychics.
That fallen
Southern Baptist twang:
oaks bearded with Spanish moss,
blooming crepe myrtles, cicadas,
parapsychologist in Bermuda shorts.
It’s Chloë, she says, the octoroon
mistress who was tree-hanged for baking
oleander into a cake
fed by the red forkful
to the white daughters.
Have you ever heard children’s laughter
rising up through the woman’s low love
moans in the room where the little
boy said, Make my sisters
get off the ceiling?
Garden dark
snuffs the gleaming eyes
as he calls her name, Chloë…
Chloë…Chloë?…until the cold
becomes the fear becomes the hell-haunted world.
Why do southern writers like you
think western writers are morose?
Why is your story chiastic?
What are you writing now?
What age did you start?
Seven. A story about Bigfoot,
but the southeastern Bigfoot, who is
smaller and meaner (than yours).
What does chiastic mean?
Aren’t cowboy songs sad?
But unspoken
until the dark climb through
the old arboretum’s dead trunks
is a question curling toward the silver
spur of a new moon: Do you believe in ghosts?
Return to Volume 1.1
|
