The summer I was ten
my mother fell in love with Elvis.
I watched her swoon into the TV set
moaning Love Me Tender to the screen,
my father's supper burning on the stove.
One morning she combed
the cotton from her hair,
packed a canvas bag
and took the train to Memphis.
When she came back
I asked where Elvis was
and she cried for days.
Men! I remember her saying years later,
me sixteen and broken~hearted
by a boy across the tracks
whose name I never knew.
Morning until dusk
I walked the brooding rails.
Through June and through July
and into August
until summer loaded up and left
the way a yard sale closes down at dark,
the racks of faded dresses hauled back in.
We both survived.
That boy moved away to Kansas
and the county covered up the tracks
with pitch and tar.
Father took Mother back
and never mentioned Elvis.
And mother never burned his food again
nor sang.

We love these old caves--Lascaux,
Altamira--and walk carefully
the way we always enter the past,
our hands bearing
the artificial light of this world.
We imagine those first hunters
crouched, conjuring luck,
carving into rock-swell
their simple art--whole herds of bison,
the haunches, the powerful heads, floating
orderless along the walls.
and some are climbing sky
as if they were stars, planets
orbiting something they cannot see.
Centuries will pass before they
right themselves, their hooves
coming down onto the deep
wet floor of leaf-fall.
Remembering earth.
Remembering where it was
they were headed.

The love that ended yesterday in Texas
crawled out of the sea 
fresh-eared and barnacled,
his lashless eyes astonished
at the shook-out world
where nothing swayed or rippled
but stood one-minded and dry,
pointing forever upward.
He dressed
and boarded a slow boat
that kept him centuries adrift,
finally jumping ship
in a country shaped like a lobster,
the claws of its faraway shores
reaching out to him.
There his journey continued

like the long, slow haul
of a glacier, over mountains,
through gorges and canyons,
across prairies where
ghosts of Indians
whispered his many names.
To the edge of the desert
where he bought a hat
and mounted the horse
that brought him here
to this honky-tonk,
to the corner near the jukebox
where he sits
mourning the woman
whose voice, like the sea,
still calls him.

so many it seems there's one for each of us,
our own personal saviors, machine guns
slung across their breasts 
like children being carried to safety.
But by now she's finished--her baggage
stuffed with tiny dolls
stiff in the obsolete clothing
of their histories--and has called a cab
to take her to the airport where she'll wait,
counting her breaths, trusting the troops
already gathering, flooding
the gates and runways. Like the rivers
of that country she'll go home to,
the rivers that must have run there
in the first days of its life,
he first good days of its life.

  You Can't Drive The Same Truck Twice
                                      for my ex-husband

When I heard the sudden
thunder of my husband's truck
explode into the drive
and saw him, after ramming
the defective gear-stick
into neutral, emerge crazy-eyed
and fevered, fling up
the battered hood, go down
and disappear beneath its open wound
of primer, I knew how the evening
would go. How deep into moonlight
he would hang like Jonah, half in,
half out, his full weight givento the wrench, gripped to the stripped
bolts and nuts, capping and uncapping
the ancient battery, his body
lost to that odd carcass of scavenged parts.
I loved him for his love of broken things--
the handleless hoes and axes, the sprung
rumble seat bought years ago
at auction, the legless chairs
retrieved from garbage heaps,
that truck each day he reinvented.
Like the rivers of Heraclitus. Like Van Gogh's
olive trees and irises that quiver,
still. Bristle. As if caught forever
in the antique instant of their opening.
It's why we love Jesus, some philosopher
once said, instead of God. Why lovers
love the moon that's always falling.

One of these days, Alice. One
of these days! Ralph Kramden's bus-driver voice
would threaten as whole families in good-hearted
American anger shook their fists into Saturday night's
black and white glow of The Honeymooners. Outside

beneath a corrugated sky of stars, bomb shelters
flickered their snow network across the lawns
and how sweet it was, my sister and me, after Alice
and Ralph had made up once again and our mother
and father had climbed the long separate stairs
to their beds. How sweet those wild boys we knew
were waiting at the corner of Eleventh and Elm,
their souped-up Chevy humming and sputtering
as we crawled in for the climb up Cemetery Bluff.
Later, as streetlights began their timed dying-out,
they would drop us off, our backs and thighs
a throbbing grid of coils and springs. And always,
just as we turned, quiet, onto the path leading
to our porch, certain we'd pulled it off this time,
our mother's voice, tired and other-worldly; floating
from the window above--I'll get you, just you wait,
tomorrow, and we imagined a ghostly fist rising
out of her sleep as if we and our little crime
existed only in the bad neighborhood of her dreams.
But by tomorrow she had somehow forgotten her threat
that seemed to drift like fallout onto our heads,
like soot from the millyard smokestack
tomorrow, and we imagined a ghostly fist rising
out of her sleep as if we and our little crime
existed only in the bad neighborhood of her dreams.
But by tomorrow she had somehow forgotten her threat
that seemed to drift like fallout onto our heads,
like soot from the millyard smokestack

that dirtied the laundry she had so carefully
hung. And we, like Alice, had again escaped
the Great One's wrath. That house is gone now.
Those boys. My sister cities away
and Jackie Gleason dead. Bomb shelters obsolete
as the backseats of cars, now that we die for love.
Still, who could help but wonder exactly what it was
my sister and I and Alice had night after night
escaped. Or if we had escaped at all, knowing
how the channels sometimes cross and the voices
blur--/'// get you, just you wait, tomorrow.
How in the truant heart that old fist still shakes.