from Blackwater Quartet, selection 6

Raising Dixie Jesus

Floating weightless
in the focus of the prism, a true believer
balanced in the Brownie’s bubble viewer:
it’s Easter,1958.
The screen door knocks closing.
I stand unruffled,
formal in the formality of the blessed.
 
Mother steadies and the shutter pops.
The two-tone, pink on pink
of our high-finned family Dodge
fades to black and white.
On the morning of the risen dead
I stare into its headlight glare and wait for my release.
 
In the Methodist church at the top of Main,
the organ’s vox humana brocades
John Wesley’s silvery, lowbrow rhymes,
in the nave Christ espalier, the greenstick break of day
born in frantic pastorals
where sops from Proverbs pasteurise the dead.
 
The fallen fall still,
broken in the levees and the jambalaya farms,
Africans hanging lantern-like
from neo-classical façades.
Nothing saves you from yourself.
The panorama of the sky and all below it
perish in a whisper, reborn in Alabama.
 
…I clock in at the factory, chasing overtime on Sundays—
home later in the yard, washing the pickup,
the cherryflake metallic paint
so bright, I could reach right through
to touch that other face, beyond that trick of light
the brother so familiar. 

He comes to me then, in the heat of the day
hard by the axletree, where rebel lords
repair the fierce horizon.