1.
In which I try to decipher
the story it tells,
this syntax of monuments
flanking the old courthouse:
here, a rough outline
like the torso of a woman
great with child—
a steatite boulder from which
the Indians girdled the core
to make of it a bowl,
and left in the stone a wound; here,
the bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson,
quill in hand, inventing
a language of freedom,
a creation story—
his hand poised at the word
happiness. There is not yet an ending,
no period—the single mark,
intended or misprinted, that changes
the meaning of everything.
Here too, for the Confederacy,
an obelisk, oblivious
in its name—a word
that also meant the symbol
to denote, in ancient manuscripts,
the spurious, corrupt, or doubtful;
at its base, forged
in concrete, a narrative
of valor, virtue, States’ Rights.
Here, it is only the history of a word,
obelisk,
that points us toward
what’s not there; all of it
palimpsest, each mute object
repeating a single refrain:
remember this.
2.
Listen, there is another story I want
this place to tell: I was a child here,
traveling to school through the heart of town
by train, emerging into the light
of the square, in the shadow of the courthouse,
a poetics of grief already being written.
This is the place to which I vowed
I’ d never return, hallowed ground now,
a vault of memory, the new courthouse enshrining
the story of my mother’s death—
her autopsy, the police reports, even
the smallest details: how first
her ex-husband’s bullet entered
her raised left hand, shattering the finger
on which she’ d worn her rings; how tidy
her apartment that morning, nothing
out of place but for, on the kitchen counter,
a folding knife, a fifty-cent roll of coins.
3.
Once, a poet wrote: books live in the mind
like honey inside a bee hive. When I read those words
to my brother, after his release, this is what he said:
Inside the hive of prison, my mind lived in books.
It was a small library, he told me: several bibles,
a few dictionaries, lots of dime-store fiction,
some good novels, too. He’ d spend hours reading
until he could read no more. What he wished for,
he said, was to get through an entire book,
but each one ended before the story did—
the last pages ripped out so someone could roll
a cigarette. At first he hated missing the endings,
the not knowing, but then he began to write,
in his head, a book of the lost stories—each ending
another possible outcome. He wrote all year
until the day he walked out of the prison
into a story he could write from beginning.
4.
I have counted the years I am
a counter of years ten twenty
thirty now So much gone and yet
she lives in my mind like a book
to which I keep returning even
as the story remains the same
her ending the space she left
a wound a womb a bowl hewn