Black Snakes and Happy
a long poem
A Note about these “poems.”
A few years ago, I would not have considered them poems, nor would have considered writing a long poem, nor would I have considered these segmented little pieces all one poem. So, if you think they aren’t, my apologies, and I half understand and agree with you.
Being who I am, several months ago, due to the good fortune of many people’s influence on me, which, which of course starts way back with my mom and dad at Connells Point, Arkansas, and leading up through Mark Heyne, Al Filreis, and George Bowering, and Ron Silliman. I made a dumb remark on Facebook about not reading long poems without realizing who I was talking to. This set me on the path to write this collection. So whether it is poetry at all, one poem, or many poems, I hope you enjoy it
I Connell’s Point, Arkansas
i
Mama’s green dress
and hair in a tight bun
holding me on the old wooden porch of the tiny parsonage, while daddy and my big brother bring Happy and her twelve puppies around the corner of the house, looking for all the world like an unspotted version of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and me, a two-year old sitting on the porch amazed, transfixed and a little horrified, only now realizing
this is my first
memory of life.
ii
Daddy and my big brother
rush into the house where
I am eating my biscuit with syrup and butter
“Come see, come see, Daddy killed a black snake!” my brother yelled. Biscuit in one sticky hand and mama holding the other I tumble out on the front porch to see a long black snake at the base of the steps neatly chopped into twelve bloody pieces. I peer over the edge down
the three feet to the dirt
and finish my biscuit.
iii
Across the way stood
an old school house
once painted, now gray clapboard rotted and sagging and a poor family squatted there for a while. Twelve children, more boys than girls and the older boys would walk the top of the schoolyard swing sets like balance beams
until they fell
and moaned in the dirt.
iv
My father the preacher,
late for his own service
with a washcloth spit washing our dirty faces and hands and walking us across the dirt road to the church where we all sang a capela hymns and spirituals until daddy would get up
and tell us stories.
v
Old men, to me,
at age three,
though much younger than I am now sitting after Sunday dinner with the preacher and his family, telling tales while the women cleaned up and all I remember is the smell of a house
too many years heated
by wood smoke
vi
Red round taillights
new 1962 Galaxy 500,
shining in my imagination of a Sunday afternoon. Aunt Nona Crisp kept it parked in an open car port on a dusty road, but Uncle Johnny wiped the dust off at least once a day. My brother said don’t get finger prints on it, but I had to swirl my fingers in the round glass lens
and dream about
driving it to the moon
vii
Two little boys
in a stall shower,
in a bathroom built onto the back porch, as an afterthought when indoor plumbing came, leaning out the back screen door to holler at mama, picking strawberries in the little strip between the house and the cotton field, “mama where are the towels?” Mama in her yellow rubber gloves and straw hat wiping her brow with her arm, straightening,
then peeling the gloves
and coming in to dry us off.
viii
Vickie Moore where have you gone?
Behind the parsonage with the weeping willow tree that shaded our window, behind the cotton field, lived Macleod Moore and his wife and daughter. On nice days all four of us would walk back the dirt road, chasing grasshoppers and missing mud puddles and we brothers would play with Vickie, who had a nice toy box and whose age fell half way in between ours but I was only three when we moved away.
I never saw Vickie again until my 14th summer when we were visiting and I saw this pretty girl in pigtails bouncing down the freshly graded road driving her daddy’s pickup truck. This past year when I called my old friend Donna Ray to tell my mama had died, I asked about Vickie. “She, and her husband both died,
a few years ago.
Cancer.”
II Jasper, Alabama
i
Coal trucks
rumble up and down
mountain sides while I eat moon pies in the back seat under the moonlight and wonder at the oddly shaped TV tower. I don’t know why I know it is one, unless I asked daddy.
He knows everything.
ii
Metal peddle cars
that look like real cars
from the 1940s, giant orange leaves make patterns on the older brown ones and older cousins tell terrifying stories of boogie men in the woods and how they cut off my brother’s head with a butcher knife. My brother pops out from the shed
when I begin to cry.
iii
Chicken houses
and a dusty dark attic
because the parsonage is in no condition for habitation. We weren’t allowed into the chicken houses, but the smell came into ours. The stairway led up to a closed door until my brother snuck up and beckoned me to see when mama was out.
Cobwebs, boxes and dirty dormer windows
and I never went
up there again.
iv
Three houses in two years,
I never moved so much.
This a little brick house and no chickens. My brother went to school and I played all day with a big red barrel full of plastic bricks from the American Brick Company but I liked it most when daddy would
sit on the floor after supper
and build with me.
v
Aunt Shirley,
daddy’s pretty redheaded younger sister
came to visit me. She and her English professor husband came to visit us all, but Aunt Shirley always made me feel like she came to see just me. And we doodled for doodle bugs in the holes in the sandy yard out back, but found none and I told her the tall grass in the adjoining pasture was Johnson grass and told her I guessed they named it for President Johnson
which she thought was cute
and shared with everyone at supper.
vi
Somewhere we lived
next door to a nice lady
with a ball chime with string you could pull and it would play the song about mistletoe and she would always give me a kiss when I pulled it. She smoked a lot and in my four-year old way I told she needed to quit because it was a sin. I knew about sin because my daddy was a holiness preacher and he knew everything. She said she knew it and tried hard to quit and I suggested she hold her breath like you do to quit the hiccups and she kissed me
and I hadn’t even
pulled the string.
vii
The nice lady
had a TV
and we didn’t. Movies and TVs were sinful, but we had a radio and record player built a long wooden cabinet with a top that opened a sewing machine table. I mostly listened to Firestone Christmas LPs all year long.
But when JFK was assassinated, I went down to her house to watch little John-John salute the coffin. Later I realized he and I were the same age. I was so glad nobody assassinated my daddy and I went back across the yard
and climbed up
in my daddy’s lap.
viii
To the east
of our house
lived a little girl who was adopted. She was the first person I ever knew of who was adopted. My brother said her parents were dead and so she had to go live with somebody else. My brother usually told the truth, but I don’t know about this story. Somehow I got it in my head they had been shot, and somehow, maybe because of the loud popping, I thought of my mama making canned biscuits every morning. I dreamed I had been shot and I turned into the empty foil backed paper wrapper the biscuits came in, gently rocking back and forth attached at both ends to the little silver discs. I woke up glad to be alive and so hopeful no one would
shoot me and turn me
into a paper wrapper.
ix
Kenny’s daddy
had been in the big one
even though Kenny and I were the same age and my daddy was a teenager following the war on maps in the newspaper. In the basement they had an old phone that you had to click and say “operator”, only there was no operator. And they had Nazi helmets and knives and stuff he took off dead Germans. We couldn’t touch it, but Kenny and I would go play in the vacant lot next door with its tall grass and crawl on our bellies and sneak up on the Germans and throw hand grenades
that looked like green pine cones.
We always won the war.
III Active, Alabama
i
I was five
when I learned
to hate Christmas. I still loved Jesus, but we had a fall Sears catalog and there were matching “wet-look” jackets, his and hers and I thought if I could give my mom and dad a set, they would be hip and cool like the people in the catalog. Mama was the best in the world and Daddy knew everything, but they were not so fancy. When I tried to tell Mama why I wanted to get the jackets, she just said it wasn’t the kind of thing they would wear, so we got her another box of Fabergé powder and some pink house slippers and Daddy some more long brown dress socks and they were happy. I got corduroy pants and blue blazer. And I hated Christmas for all the disappointments it was and all the disappointments to come.
I don’t love Jesus, anymore,
but I still hate Christmas.
ii
Mrs. Latham lived
across the road
and she played the piano at church and she was beautiful and her daughter, Regina was my best friend. I was in love with Mrs. Latham and she didn’t mind. Regina and Mrs. Latham and her husband lived in a nice brick house and we would go for Sunday dinners and for Regina’s birthday where we played “pin the tail on the donkey” and I won. And the Lawleys lived next door in an old wooden farm house with mules in the barn. They were Mrs. Latham’s parents and would come over sometimes when we came to visit. Somebody made macaroni with bacon on top and a thick layer of cheese over everything.
I liked macaroni like my Mamma made
Out of a blue box.
iii
Sometimes we would go
to Regina’s grandma’s house
to play and she had cedar bushes growing along her long, low front porch and we would find the caterpillar eggs hanging from the limbs and they were like silky Christmas ornaments and we would rip them open to see the bug inside. No one told us not to and Mrs. Lawley would bring us little green bottles of Dr. Pepper that said “10, 2 and 4.” Mrs. Lawley’ house had an iron stove in the middle of a dark kitchen with a tin flue going off at an angle out the roof and in the in the winter the room
was hot and smelled
of pine knots.
iv
Behind our house
but really more behind the church
a sandy path ran past Mamma’s garden and down to a little stream. My brother and I would go there to look for fish and tadpoles and build damns and other things. Mama took to resting a lot and she couldn’t see us where we played so sometimes we would walk up the creek through a large culvert under the federal highway and up onto the dirt parking lot of the truck stop. And the lady there would give us free candy and even though they came to Daddy’s church,
she never told our Mama we came
so we never got a whipping.
v
Henry was a little boy
about my age who came to church
with his grandma and one Sunday morning in the winter we got to watch old Mister Ellis vacuum wasps that came out from around the windows painted to look like stained glass. And one night during a revival meeting, he told me about his uncle who lived just across the tracks had tried to kill himself with a shotgun, but instead had blown his face off but was going to live. I tried to imagine why someone would do that and what it would be like
to live without a face.
vi
Byron Brush was
almost my cousin
and he lived in a nearby town were his daddy was the preacher. One time he got to spend the day with me and we played in the creek and the teepee Daddy built out of old burlap sacks and a pine tree. But the thing I remember most was racing across the harvested corn field with broken stalks all askew to get to the GM&O train as it raced through the darkening dusk. He won by a mile and I so wanted
to be Byron Brush.
IV Montgomery
i
Twenty-Thirty-Seven Mona Lisa Drive,
the first address I ever needed to know
so I could tell someone how to get me home if I was ever lost or if the school needed to know, and I knew it the first day mama drove us to school. We rode in the back of the brown Dodge pickup with the wooden toolboxes on the sides never thinking until today what the doctors’ and lawyers’ kids must have thought. Later we rode our hand-me-down bikes the mile to school past a barking dog and the bully at the end of the street, past the Episcopal church
with its low hanging eaves
I could touch from the ground.
ii
Bear School had rules
And wooden floors they oiled
once per week and we went barefoot until third grade and our feet were always black. And I lived in an all-white Montgomery except for my rich uncle’s maid and his construction workers who sometimes came by my aunt’s house to pick up a tool or something. Then in 1968 my fourth grade teacher was black and her name was Mrs. Bullard and I wonder what she thought teaching all us white kids who asked her rude questions without meaning harm. She survived and so did we and the next year they integrated the student body so my parents took us out
to go to a “Christian” school
one hundred miles away!
iii
279-8819
Is the number
to my rich uncle’s house,
though I almost never called to talk to him, but instead one of his five sons. Or it was, from the time they built the new house in a modern high end neighborhood called Eagle Pass at 120 Lookout Ridge and I memorized one evening at Wednesday night church over forty years ago. A few years ago I was sitting in the kitchen at their house. We had just buried my aunt, who died months after my uncle. We, being out of town relatives who spent the night in their home one last time. The beige wall phone rang and someone answered it. But I thought to myself right then, “I’ll never need to call that number again.” And now there are so many numbers and addresses, so many people and places I keep alive in my mind with their address and phone number who will finally be dead to me when I am dead, too and no one will keep those numbers in their head, but maybe someone
will keep me alive by holding the number
they will never call again.
