An Afterlife: 1953-1988

Thirty-five years, a gory rake-

My parents scrubbed in laughing prime,

The Kennedys, King, sixty thousand

Baffled sons in Vietnam,

The countless thousand sons they offed,

Mobs of flower-handed girls

Keening for rescue, blazing kids,

A normal stock of routine pillage,

Lunacy, rapture, genocide, famine;

And then my legs unstrung, both frozen,

Me flung down to sit through what

May be of time, need, gift.

But here, a clear warm day, I come

On a hare-brained backward lunge, trucked up

In a black wheelchair by chuckling friends

To scout my youth and hunt the cabin

Where I passed a slow ten summer weeks

With boys smooth as baby birds-

Mild, still naked-hearted toward

A world they'd barely dreamed was mad.

We've got a key from the owner's son;

And once we pass a final gate

Where hemlocks start, I know each rock,

Each fern primeval.

No tears yet

But a blunt amazement humps up hot

In my dry mouth. When we break in

On the heart of the place, it's beating still,

Though derelict for more than a decade.

The eyeless rake only groomed this hill,

Steep green breast where I worked my twenty-first

Summer-guide and shield for a dozen

Tads, ten to twelve, in this likable

Warehouse, school and stomping ground

For bored sprouts in the dogday swelter:

Summer camp.

Sequoyah, after

The red inventor of Cherokee writing,

Laid up half a mountainside

In the floating Smokies by a fierce-eyed saint

And ramrod dreamer-Albert "Chief" Johnson

Never saw a boy whose timbers he

Couldn't shiver and brace for stiff headwinds:

Manhood! Seize it! God's high hope!

Your very name is on His lips!

Chief's daunted too, buried uphill

In magnanimous block-high hemlocks

Straight as the hope he nursed for man.

The swarms of boys are random-sown

Through a denser world that may or may not

Be one amp of voltage brighter

For his husky ardor, sleepless labor,

The force of this nursery he gouged by will

From granite and the hearts of trees.

I've been away since that last morning,

August 1953, when I

Left to lurk for two more years

At home and college; then the headlong

Spiky trail of my getaway, the mottled

Roll of Chased and Caught-trawling

Love in phosphorescent cities:

Glorious limbs and music thick

As baled swansdown or sunbaked mire-

Through that much time: no bitter month.

Same eye today, same skull-I hunt

Chief's house, the office, sickbay, lodge,

Library, crafts house, breezy low dining

Hall, oval ballfield, a waving swell

Of foot-deep turf uphill to the cabins

Propped on stilts.

I try to see

Two hundred yards toward where I guess

My cabin stood. Young blue cedars

Fog the view, but I point that way.

And my tall friend says "Here you go."

Two more join and, while I cheerfully

Yell "No need," they lug me up.

The chair rolls game on ground rough as gator

Hide.

It's there. Steps rotted, roof pocked,

Charming as a hatchet-built filagree box

But efficient as watchworks, host to nothing

Bigger than mice, squirrels, the brindle

Panther.

A friend says "Ready?"

I think

He means "To roll downhill." And set

On stemming a risky flood, I say "You

Bet."

Three bearers lift me, levitate

Three pulpy steps, park me safe

Inside.

Dense air, cool as evening,

Brown as dusk-there, here

I finally am-thirty-five ticking

Years down a ring road.

The eight

Bunks swim up first from murk-

Four two-tiered six-foot canvas slings

That once stretched taut to sleep light bodies.

All but one are ready to serve

This moment-vacant, clean and dry

(One's torn and fallen, the one that bore

My sole bedwetter, a chunky towhead).

Mine, the right top-sling by the door,

Suddenly stops my hungry eyes-

The boy I was those seventy nights,

Crusty with love as a cross with blood.

Fervent taps of the pressure valve

Would spare my mind, my mustang body,

Its devastation one more day;

Then through six hundred dreaming hours-

Tads sighing round me-I built designs

For my doomed try at knotting myself

In Gordian toils with a lanky blond,

Noble as Neptune, healthy as lye

And bent on yielding me nothing but shame

When what I craved was joint safety.

(Safety! The eros-octane in me,

Spilled and lit, would have jacked the crest

Of this hefty outcrop a quarter-mile higher

In chattering dark and crazed the hides

Of all live creatures in a five-mile arc

Like air-thin china in a runaway kiln.)

One friend, a camper years after me,

Says "'Where's the plaque with your boys' names?"

I say "Plaques came well after my time"

And look to a tidy line of boards

Nailed at the eaves. Dim as we are,

With me hunched low, I see no words

And turn again to study my bunk-

The time I rolled in after midnight,

Back from a long day-off in Asheville,

And vaulted into my covers to feel

The chill depths lined with chillier rocks.

Both feet clenched, suspecting worse-

A snapping turtle or frosty snake

Mad for heat and a chance at fury-

Fond welcome home from the comatose boys.

A friend says "Ah! The Great Memory falters!"

He's stretching a match to the webby heights-

A brown plaque, maybe nine by five

And older than most, apparently blank.

But then he reads, a blind child groping,

"1953 -Reynolds Price, Counselor-

Paul Auston, Jim Avery,

Ed Grimsley, Buddy McKenzie,

Tommy More, Raiford Baxley,

Terry Brookshire, George Harrell,

Jonathan Lindsey, Lester Shepherd.

Ten-week campers: Bill Barrington

And Randy Floyd."

Stunned as a beef

At the abattoir door,

I hear the dead names hurtle through me-

Searing, healing, possibly both.

As six friends gang at the wonder site,

I sink in merciful isolation

And watch a line of figures scramble

From an unsuspected open grave-

A dozen boys, twelve heads for the names,

Big teeth, chopped hair, a team of voices:

None cracked, each laughing, not a tear

In the loaded days.

And none from me,

All-Purpose Font, those days or now.

Halfway uphill, jigged in pain,

I'd wondered coldly why I shanghaied

A weekend's rest for a retrograde,

Dead-sure to appall-Broke-Down Me

Hunts Me At the Full: hard boy, primed

For a life that looked in this pure air

Plainly unending, a noonday glide

But ran a quick hot thirty-one years

Toward an unmapped iron murderous wall

That ended me.

Here though, reborn-

Amply friended, spoiled as a pasha,

Unmanned in a fecund afterlife-

I watch the boys' eyes sink again;

And I hear these lean words, mute though clear,

The pitch of Hopkins' "Felix Randal":

How far from then forethought of, all

Thy more boisterous years.

Boisterous, good

To see, starved as a stoat and wild

To couple-for chance, bliss, mayhem-

Impeccably kind and cruel as the child

I'd only just been: now this snowcapped

Hulk on wheels.

How far from then

Forethought of. But grand.

Before a friend can turn from the wall

And smile down toward me, I watch the coals

Of my sequestered phoenix pyre

Flare inside me, light for every

Soul in darkness.

Grander still-

Young, I stood here, cocked but barren.

Old, I sit in a hole my green

Self cut in this clean air but seeing now

In my new head a sight my green mind

Never dreamed-the eyes, lips, talons,

Rampant songs and muffled names

Of incontestable angels hid

Past this roof, past the blue abyss-

From all but me, the sole relay

For man on Earth and Earthly beasts

Of seraph hymns in adoration,

Praise, undying blame and glee.

I breast their scalding tides of anguish,

Drink their essence-pain and promise,

Grace and torment-

Know the back

Of God's right hand (my teeth still taste

His acrid blood), know Death will somedays

Stall at a door if strong eyes bay him;

Know he marks strict time in silence,

One live friend moves,

"Sure, let's take it." His broad hand reaches

For the coded plaque still aimed at time,

A plucky voyager.

My own hand lifts,

Unspeakably strong, to stop him there.

"It lives here. Leave it." I trust they see

The choice is mine, a power earned

In walking toward the boiling core

On shards of broken mirrors barefoot;

Then returning, charred but me.

Let this pine board endure its earned

Fate, in place here-bearing its news

To silence, nestlings, the stone-deaf adder.

My friend's hand drops, though no friend kneels

And no head nods to the solar flare

That fuses light herself with time

Behind my brow, this bony ridge

That bears the fire-outright knowledge

Of how to stay and how to leave,

What to hold and when to loose:

The only secret, utter loss,

Glad surrender of every hope but the life

That, breath by slow sweet breath, confounds

An end.

I blink a long instant,

Rig my grinning mask to join them-

Affable gimp.

Two more minutes,

They bear me out and down again,

Heavy but likewise potent as pig iron.

Flung toward dark, a homing bird.