When I’m young — in my fifties
e.g. — I think of myself as water,
green & unconfined. I soak up
all I encounter — oxygen,
biology, heavy rain, languages,
clades, accounts of long gone
explorers — sponge & loggerhead,
custard apple, neighborhood
potluck. Must it proceed, age —
wear down the jagged sharps,
the pitched rapids, slippery rocks
zippered by flashing fish
to yellowed, scoured dunes?
Nocturne for the Night Workers of the South
by Joshua Poteat
Once, when I was young and loved every girl that breathed
the same summer as I did, I worked as a night watchman
in the county asylum, a forgotten place, lost among
the kudzu, the long-leaf pines birthing cones the size
of watermelons. It was the kind of place that, when it rained,
spotted-moth larva would tunnel from the wet plaster ceilings
and drink the patient’s ears. The county wanted it forgotten,
their own kind gone bad, like in the Bible, where Christ
slaps rotting eggs from the yellow mouths of lepers.
Eat of this bread, he said, or something close, and the lepers
scraped up the eggs and made a sandwich, and I imagine for
the first time, Christ shrugged. You are what you eat,
he should have said, if he had any truth left in him by then.
I wasn’t allowed to talk to the patients, and usually,
they were all medicated by the time I hitched a ride
there, on the backs of flatbeds wedged between crates
of sweet potatoes rotting under the moon.
When I found out that I wasn’t really a night watchman
but an owl catcher, and would have to incinerate any owl
I caught, I stayed on anyway. I needed the work.
According to legend, seeing a Horned Owl during a meal
was supposed to mean, Don’t finish your stew.
Barn owls seen more than mile or so from their perches
were wandering ghosts, or meant that ghosts
would soon force themselves into your dreams,
a madness I could do without.
Sighting a Snowy Owl meant bones would ache
but without further consequence. They would simply ache
for a while, then stop. I found this applied for all owls.
My whole body ached then. When I dressed for work
it was like dressing a wound. I couldn’t tell if it was the girls
or the birds. I became good at it, though, despite the ache,
if that is even possible, chewing the stolen, orange meat
of potatoes to keep me awake, slumped in the attics
with a canvas bag from the laundry room.
Christ also said, Any true work is done alone. This I believe.
The sweat of the insane is sweeter than ours:
clover and bee’s wing and honeyed ham.
I could hear them breathing beneath me in their beds. Don’t ask how
it was to be so near that bleak sea of faces. It’s the faces, paint flaking off,
dolls with blinking eyes, snow of paint in spilled urine.
Even their white breath, eight-petaled in the chill of their rooms,
was something I couldn’t name.
Dogwood: no. Wild pea: perhaps . . . but no. Chamomile,
milk-weed: never. I never looked at them, the pink azalea of hair
between their legs, luminous with lice, not even down
the blouses of the nurses when they bent to look in
at the big-headed owls. Now, I think I brought those birds
down through the wards, alive and flapping,
so someone would stop me. No one ever gets tired of the moon.
No one ever said, Fuck the moon, let’s get it out of here.
We keep it around, we learn to like it.
Habit is the devil’s glorious invention, like I heard war could be.
Easing a bayonet into a belly was the same as opening
a can of tomatoes by firelight if you did it enough.
These were birds and I burned them and on rare days
I remember their heads, round and milky, baby’s breath,
their wings not really wings, finally, but damp bolts of silk,
and the low sough of wind dragging their ashes into September’s arms.
I remember the story of General Lee on his deathbed
telling a sad friend to cheer up, that he had known
but three happy hours during his whole existence.
Two of those as a child asleep in the boughs of a white oak,
the last in an asylum staring at a beautiful girl’s naked ribcage
that had been woven into a basket by tuberculosis.
Night transcends what the proudest day can do, that’s for damn sure,
all silently,
the indescribable night and stars,
far off and silently.
