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The Word Damn and the Word God
Who knows what strung those words
together on my tongue
the summer Chris moved in across the alley, all those long
June hours we tiptoed
the rusted-out railroad, begging for the vibration
of approaching freight
or trolling for errant shots from the
tear-shaped water hazards
of McCabe’s golf course, playing Yahtzee camped out in the
dome tent pitched in his back yard,
searching in the numbers for any sign of
first light.
But my money’s on that afternoon I stepped into a mining
bees’ hive, mid-stride catching a touchdown spiral with time
running out, their home woven among the roots
of Chris’s peach tree. For weeks thereafter,
St. Anne’s across the street
called Repent! Repent!, I the kid
who stormed the neighborhood
in escape of bees, crying
countless curses, every inch
of my body scorched, a hymnal
of Goddamns! tucked
between biceps and bird chest. Chris’s father poured
two gallons of gasoline on that construct of whispers,
and my father let me watch him drop a lit match
into the earth from our high kitchen window. That night
Chris gave me a mason jar of dead miners curled up
like
wolf spiders swept out from under the couch, and all night
I
dreamt of the mason’s magic, bees rising from invisible
spindles
in the grass in that pause between time
and conflagration.
But my mother decided it was Chris, who
through the
darkness of a few nights later, she heard screaming
Goddamns!
with each strike of the father’s leather
across
the son’s back. I cried when my father told me
I no longer could play with Chris, and he wept
when I said, “But Chris is all I have.” Chris who caught
a carp a day later, his prize strung up by an arm’s- thick
tree branch through its breathers. Chris
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who liked to strum the
testicles of his pit bull Rex
who was mean as hell
kept chained to a sycamore
by the alley between our yards
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but when Chris was around,
turned into the sweetest thing.
Chris who I thought of this morning as fog lifted to reveal
three acres of wheat
grass frosted silver reaching
for the polestar like a bed of
nails, and I was flung back
to the day I stumbled from Chris’s basement, a two-by-four
rust-nailed to
my heel; Chris unhooking Rex’s chain;
the panic
bitter in my mouth; my eyes squeezed shut…
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then the warm slap of
Rex’s tongue from foot
to nail, from nail to foot—
Chris and I bearing witness to the healing power
of a dog’s saliva as he
rubbed Rex’s balls and Rex groaned
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as blood eased from my skin.
He and his father moved
late that fall, chasing factories
Deep South,
and now Chris lives in that place where everything
seems true.
Some say his father took to Evan Williams.
say Chris simply became what he was.
And I wish I could say I’ve run into him in line at the DMV
or at some bar I’ve come to for the dancing
and there’s Chris
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stitched into fishnets, neon strobes like moons
in his vinyl knee-highs,
eye-shadow thick as clay
into tire tread. Wish I could
say we’ve laughed over beers
and told old stories,
slapped one another on the back and paid each other’s tab.
But Chris’s father didn’t bother
to clean the boning knife
sequined from yet another Sunday on Arkabutla Lake,
three largemouth reserved on
their bed of ice, Rex
outside howling. And now I wonder
if this explains
that Summer of Goddamns Chris yowled
down all those railroad miles; l
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how he always knew at the splits which curves turned
toward the switchyard and which paved the path
to Tennessee’s Jerusalem.
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So Glory Be to the Goddamns
he cried all those hours it takes
a knife to the gut to kill
a man. Goddamns
to the hours it must have taken
Chris to die. Goddamns
to the carp we never caught; to the knife destined
for Chris’s gut. Goddamns to all dogs too weak to loose
their chains. Goddamns to all the stories we do not tell.
To all fathers angry with their sons,
Goddamn.
If I could, I’d take Chris in my arms. I’d get down
with the grit and linoleum and patch that rift of skin
with my tongue. I’d hold the boy drunk between two lives.
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I’d freeze ourselves and wait for the sculptor
who fools greatness out of stone,
our two bodies draped one into the other.
The word damn and the word God.
