Читать книгу I Know Your Kind - William Brewer D. - Страница 11

OXYANA, WEST VIRGINIA

None of it was ever ours: the Alleghenies,

the fog-strangled mornings of March,

cicadas fucking to death on the sidewalks,

the pink heads of rhododendrons

lopped off by the wind.

We wrestled earth with alchemy,

turned creek beds into wineglasses

the Roosevelts used at state dinners,

fueled fires hot as the sun’s dreams.

And there was light: a mile deep

in the underworld mines,

beaming from our foreheads

like wings through dust.

Not even the days we called beautiful.

Autumn weekends when DC drove in

to take pictures. Women in silk dresses

picking our apples, posing,

holding our bushel baskets

with a tenderness we’ve never known.

Snow days, belly-crawling

onto the frozen lake

to hear the ice recite the Iliad.

Not Hog Hill where Massey Energy

dumped cinder, the gray waste

between breaths, poisoned trees

black like charred bones,

where we burned cars while girls

wrote our death dates on our palms

with their tongues—even now,

rain choking the throats of smokestacks,

the river a vein of rust and trash.

Have you ever seen so many cold faces

slapped in the afternoon?

So many voices screaming— Wake up.

This is beyond desire.

This is looking through a hole

in the wall around heaven.

How do you forget that—

a world without ruin,

a world that can’t be taken?

Where once was faith,

there are sirens: red lights spinning

door to door, a record twenty-four

in one day, all the bodies

at the morgue filled with light.

Who can stand another night

stealing fistfuls of pills

from our cancer-sick neighbors?

Of the railcars crying,

the timber trucks hauling away

the history of a million birds?

Pitiful? Maybe. But oblivion is all we have.

And if we want to chop it down

or dig it up or send it screaming

into our hearts—it’s only now

that our survival is an issue.

Pin oaks arm wrestle over the house

as barrel fires spark like stars in the valley.

Day closes its jaws.

I can hear my brother explaining

how when Jonah woke inside the whale,

he didn’t know where he was.

I’m not saying this ends with a leviathan,

but I’m not saying it doesn’t.

Here it comes, rising through the floor,

the voice that tells me I’m tired

of the world, that pulls me down

to its pale kingdom. Should

someone find me, they’ll scream

stay with me as they fish

my tongue from my throat.

Should I wake, they’ll ask me

if I can tell them where I am.