Bowden Eley on Inauguration Day

 

 

The first faint notes

of the CD thump our small

kitchen, my grandson Bowden

and me, side by side, boys

tapping the linoleum, him

softly saying Ba Ba Ba,

all he can make at 2 years,

Awake in early dark,

and God knows why

this one heart-banging

Beach Boys tune gets him

head-nodding like a rocker.

 

If I cut off his song torment

rattles the cupboards,

his face clamps in darkness

like mine years ago

singing, then JFK’s sudden

death, so I loom and sway,

big Pop, booming

Ba Ba Ba until the fine

yellow light of dawn cries

the small Spring birds out.

We could lie down now, or we can

roll in the sweet nap of

   Grandma’ Dee’s rug, sleep is

    strumming him down smartly

as a guitar’s backbeat.

         But we go on

      humming Ba Ba Ba

     and I cradle him the way arms

         held me long ago in that fading

music of heartache. Soon I will be

         rising up endless stairs, blue sky

      taking me from him, and Dee,

      mother of his mother. We’ll go

back to dirt where we danced. But

 

     not while the CD whispers, oh

not Peggy Sue, not Betty Lou,

    who told us what to do, taking

a chance on love, finding you

           and the way leading us to

cling to each other, stepping,

clapping. bird wings fluttery as

    if joy is the future, alive and always

like us bobbing, sun

    pouring into the kitchen, just

        Pop and Bowden and ‘Bama

dancing, crying out Ba Ba Ba–

delaying whatever name’s next.

 

 

 

PHOTOGRAPH Of A WATERMAN, BULL ISLAND,

 

In my office I knot my tie before him,

the expect-it all look of his left shoulder

a fighter’s, skin of his nose and cheeks bleached,

except for liver scars, and the deep, open

mouth caught like a fish about to speak, and about

his runny eyes shade of hat is back-tilted.

 

Behind him the 100-foot pier spills to tilted

buy-house, money’s mounds of oysters opened

before memory. He’s lifted, frail arms, shoulders,

years of crabs, fish, whatever swam before him,

wrestled boats, mud sucking it all back. About

ten yards right is another pier, its bleached

 

fish-house keeping men he can’t abide, shoulders,

necks cocked in pride, backs turned. He’s walked there, bleached

sun the same, but theirs a different world to him,

old insults rotten as fish and the tilted

men who limp past same roads, same marsh, are opened

doors he can’t go through. He’s thinking about

 

blood, names, words, maybe, way his face, tilted

to see what you’ll hiss, can’t lie and won’t open

that dark gaze, as sure as burning dusk. Bleached

bay slick and marsh stink hang at his shoulder,

Saturday, catch sold, sunken hull before him

(one of them’s, he’d say), shells and scales about

 

all his shore keeps.  What would they say of him--

last of a broke oyster knife?  “O.K., open

up, shithead,” his face says to the photo, bleached.

Two sons, his boat, storm-drowned, ride down his shoulders.

On the salt-rotted pier he’s walked, tilted

sun falls finally down. Soon they’ll talk, men about

 

fire barrels, the buy-boys hovering, who don’t open

much their wallets. Faces demon-flamed, shoulders

fluttered as words sting like black flies, touching bleached

deadrise sunk, woman old, fucking catch about

worthless, back busted, weak as a child, and him,

breath so bad you might die when he breathes, tilted

 

to offer his bleached face as he might for Him

he’s pledged to, when croaker come back, and the bleached

shells rise that can’t just any man shoulder open.