one
Raw mornings
red meat of the dawn across my shoulders.
Mockingbird in the fig tree
breath leaving his beaks as a ball of startled smoke.
two
Geese in blue fog lifting clumsy out of rice fields.
Seed bull in an unplowed field bellowing
a warning.
Heffers in the pines, tick birds on their backs
calling, “forlorn, forlorn, forlorn”.
three
Blunt odor of rain held in red clay
heavy in the lungs as the smell of hog’s blood.
Night crawlers washed to the surface of the road
gathered into a dixie cup.
Used to fish for sun perch in Stephen’s Creek
where the roots of white magnolia take hold of you
try to draw you down under green water.
four
Smell of mildew rising out of cattails.
Everything alive is breathing lungs full of damp
holding it deep in the chest.
One single breath can be a refuge
a home.
five
In every heart is a bullet hole seeping blood through limestone.
I see you in a straw Stetson, feather in the hat band from a chicken
dyed for Easter.
The top is knocked out. The sun is shining into corn stubble hair
burned to ashes.
Semi-precious stones set in eye teeth, twelve crowns of gold
that make your smile two bits of a quarter moon.
Saturday in July, just before the fourth
you driving your wagon up the road to Aunt Beau’s store
pulled by four white mules in black harness, little silver bells tinkling
on the reins.
Leaning on a wooden pillar where I later carved my name
working my blood into each letter
I watched you loading burlap sacks of sorghum and of chicken feed
saw you lay them in the wagon bed gently as the daughters you had already lain
in graves side by side.
A grown man before my Daddy was born, still you lifted your hat to me
in memory of my Grandpa
who bought striped candy for your daughters once in 1924.
Stepping back, you opened the screen door wide and let me walk ahead of you
into the wooden store saying, “Yah suh, Mistah Hopkins!
Yah suh!”
Sometimes there is no difference between shame and self respect
but I didn’t know that at the time.
There was nobody with a voice thick with chaw and phlegm
to teach me how masters and their servants are cut to size.
I was just a boy and I stepped wide of you through galaxies of dust motes
into Aunt Beau’s store
that was to all of us another room in paradise.
There were pearl handled folding knives much desired in cases!
A Bowie knife in leather scabbard!
Filigreed pocket watches with long silver chains!
There were stacked boxes of .22 rifle shells, both long and short
a little .410, re-blued and hung out of reach on an antler rack!
Pork sausages coiled and on display with blocks of cheese.
Gallon jars of pigs feet and of pickles big as a grown man’s pecker.
There were packs of candy cigarettes that cost a nickel.
Camels, Pall Malls, Chesterfields with powdered sugar inside of them
a boy could blow out to look like smoke!
Bull Of The Woods Chewing Tobacco pouches that showed a longhorn
snorting fire!
As I entered ahead of you through the wide screen door and heard you say
“Yah suh, Mr. Hopkins.”
you became my teacher, your words a promise that all this would be
mine.
PAPER HANGER IN THE 1970’S
My Grandfather was a good white man. They called him Old Jule
though he was barely 60 when his heart was taken by the lard.
He was an orphan married to his first cousin, Mary, who was an orphan too.
When Mary’s mother died, her Daddy gave her to another white man
living in the thicket with no road to him.
She cooked and he kept her there and no more would anybody
say.
Riding bareback deep in piney woods with my Uncle Prather
he pointed to a shack
broken down with a tree through the roof.
“That’s where Ma stayed.”
One day in Cold Spring, my Daddy pointed to an old man and spat on the ground.
“That’s the man Ma stayed with.”
Ninety years old, drunk, falling down the road with an arm
around a black man’s neck.
Then I felt a rage rise up in me, for reasons I did not know.
There was a sighing in all of us like a hundred square miles of pine trees
a hidden anger like the lye boiled with hog lard to make the soap
that kept us clean.
I became a paper hanger working in houses of the rich
saying, “Yes Sir, yes Mam.”
With my brushes and my knives, I entered into them as the blessing of a son in mourning.
I had faith that I could see the wealth they had and still believe
I did not want it.
There was a rich woman I worked for, my Mother’s age
ten years younger than I am now.
I watched her sink bleached teeth into the palms of her own hands
while I was on a ladder, hanging ducks and yellow roosters
across the kitchen wall.
That day she listened through static on the telephone while a Texas Ranger
said her husband drove his Cadillac south of Palestine
on the old Crockett highway
where he was born on a peanut farm before the oil was found.
That day he took a shotgun and walked alone with himself into a field
unplanted.
A neighbor found him there.
What words of comfort I had were like hail falling on her shoulders.
Though my words were soft as Irish linen, they were seamless
with her weeping, with her tears.
I believe now we are only memory.
We move like vapor from the surfaces of rivers into trees.
Either we’re awake and know we’re dreaming or we’re dead and dream
we are awake.
Some men walk together with their shotguns into fields
burned black before the planting of the corn
where quail ticking in furrows and doves on limbs of pin oak trees
are torn apart like thoughts by 20 gauge shot.
Some men walk alone through furrows of an empty field
while the sun comes setting fire to cattle tanks
bringing on the night.
Some of us are paper hangers
whose hands have taught us all we need to know
about surfaces and dividing walls, how thin and tearable are the images
we place upon them.
It was November and she would not wait until Spring so we drove to a farm close by the church and gathered round a cattle tank to sing
“Shall we gather at the river…”
But the Trinity was treacherous and full of gar. The Trinity was full of holes.
The preacher wore white overalls, the woman a gown made from a bed sheet. They stepped into shivering water like two blue herons.
I remember the smell of mud around the green tank covered hard with hoof prints and cow patties, the steers we boys had driven off with swords of willow.
It did not take long to hold a handkerchief over her nose and mouth to let her three times down into the body of the Lord. She went down shivering into ecstatic waters.
written for my father, Julius Richard Hopkins, Jr., in my early forties
I feel my father rising up through me like a buffalo fish
greasy from the river bottom.
He comes up one eyed, looking at the moon
with rusted fish hooks, cat gut lines across his mouth.
And as the moon kneels down through willow branches
looking at herself in water rings
my father sees himself in me.
I see him in my shaving mirror, his coffee jitter, bit of toilet paper on the weak
and dimpled chin
smell of poot around him damp as flannel.
Taste his cigarette breath as my own again.
Listen for and hear
hound dogs baying at an empty sweetgum tree
the moon curled in its higher branches
where a possum was the night before.
There is joy in that.
I am nine months pregnant with my father
ready now to deliver
his face shouldering through mine.
I will share that face with him a while
and show his eyes for mine.
Then I will let my father rise beyond the surface of the San Jacinto River
where the sun is risen already.
THE FLOOD PLAIN, POEMS BY CHARLIE HOPKINS 