Sinners Welcome: Poems Read online

  Sinners Welcome

  Poems

  Mary Karr

  FOR MY SISTER, LECIA SCAGLIONE

  whose larger hand steered mine

  around that first, tortured cursive.

  Earliest reader, queen of the straight shot

  and the crossword, you’re the one

  I’ve always scribbled toward.

  …And I waited with anxious soul for Romeo to descend from the clouds, a satin Romeo singing of love, while backstage a dejected electrician waits with his finger on the button to turn off the moon.

  —ISAAC BABEL, Red Cavalry

  God says, to the free mind, Find me.

  —BROOKS HAXTON “Anonymous”

  Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Pathetic Fallacy

  Revelations in the Key of K

  Oratorio for the Unbecoming

  Disgraceland

  Métaphysique du Mal

  Descending Theology: The Nativity

  Delinquent Missive

  This Lesson You’ve Got

  The Choice

  A Major

  Waiting for God: Self-Portrait as Skeleton

  At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave a Message

  Elegy for a Rain Salesman

  Who the Meek Are Not

  Hypertrophied Football Star as Serial Killer

  Orders from the Invisible

  Requiem: Professor Walt Mink (1927–1996)

  Pluck

  Descending Theology: Christ Human

  Miss Flame, Apartment Bound, as Undiscovered Porn Star

  Reference for Ex-Man’s Next

  Winter Term’s End

  Entering the Kingdom

  Descending Theology: The Garden

  Hurt Hospital’s Best Suicide Jokes

  Sinners Welcome

  The First Step

  A Tapestry Figure Escapes for Occupancy in the Real World, Which Includes the Death of Her Mother

  Mister Cogito Posthumous

  For a Dying Tomcat Who’s Relinquished His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature

  Coat Hanger Bent into Halo

  Last Love

  The Ice Fisherman

  Descending Theology: The Crucifixion

  Red-Circled Want Ad for My Son on His Commencement

  Son’s Room

  Easter at Al Qaeda Bodega

  Garment District Sweatshop

  Overdue Pardon for Mother with Knife

  Descending Theology: The Resurrection

  A Blessing from My Sixteen Years’ Son

  Orphanage

  Still Memory

  Meditatio

  AFTERWORD: Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS BY MARY KARR

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PATHETIC FALLACY

  When it became impossible to speak to you

  due to your having died and been incinerated,

  I sometimes held the uncradled phone

  with its neat digits and arcane symbols (crosshatch,

  black star) as if embedded in it

  were some code I could punch in

  to reach you. You bequeathed me

  this morbid bent, Mother.

  Who gives her sixth-grade daughter

  Sartre’s Nausea to read? All my life,

  I watched you face the void,

  leaning into it as a child with a black balloon

  will bury her countenance

  either to hide from

  or to merge with that darkness.

  Small wonder that still

  in the invisible scrim of air

  that delineates our separate worlds,

  your features sometimes press toward me

  all silvery from the afterlife, woven in wind,

  to whisper a caution. Or your hand on my back

  shoves me into my life.

  REVELATIONS IN THE KEY OF K

  I came awake in kindergarten,

  under the letter K chalked neat

  on a field-green placard leaned

  on the blackboard’s top edge. They’d caged me

  in a metal desk—the dull word writ

  to show K’s sound. But K meant kick and kill

  when a boy I’d kissed drew me

  as a whiskered troll in art. On my sheet,

  the puffy clouds I made to keep rain in

  let torrents dagger loose. “Screw those

  who color in the lines,” my mom had preached,

  words I shared that landed me on a short chair

  facing the corner’s empty Sheetrock page. Craning up,

  I found my K high above.

  You’ll have to grow to here, its silence said.

  And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid—

  names of my beloveds, sacred vows I’d break.

  With my pencil stub applied to wall,

  I moved around the loops and vectors,

  Z to A, learning how to mean, how

  in the mean world to be.

  But while I worked, the room around me

  began to smudge—like a charcoal sketch my mom

  was rubbing with her thumb. Then

  the instant went, the month, and every season

  smeared, till with a wrenching arm tug

  I was here, grown, but still bent

  to set down words before the black eraser

  swipes our moment into cloud, dispersing all

  to zip. And when I blunder in the valley

  of the shadow of blank about to break

  in half, my being leans against my spinal K,

  which props me up, broomstick straight,

  a strong bone in the crypt of flesh I am.

  ORATORIO FOR THE UNBECOMING

  Born, I eventually grew hind legs

  to rear back on, and learned I was other

  than the miasma that mothered me,

  so begged to reenter the body. Told no,

  I staggered forth to whap my head on table corners—

  my tongue a small stub jabbering wants.

  In the morning funnies, Little Orphan Annie

  had an eye like a white pindot,

  and when I watched her blankly

  watching me, the complex universe

  crawled inside my head.

  Mirrors spooked me too. The kid inside

  eluded me, though her fingertips

  fit perfectly to mine. The mystery of who she was

  floated on a silver surface uncertain as mercury.

  The heart is a mirror also, and in my chest I felt

  this tight bud of petals held a face:

  God, with his stare of a zillion suns.

  He told me the risen Lord was a sack of meat

  and a brother to me, that the Holy Ghost

  was the girl pronoun in sacred texts

  who longed to steer

  my body’s ship. He swears now

  this form is carved by him.

  Have mercy, the soul

  singer says, and I say

  blessed be the air

  I breathe these words with, for

  it makes a body wonder.

  DISGRACELAND

  Before my first communion at 40, I clung

  to doubt as Satan spider-like stalked

  the orb of dark surrounding Eden

  for a wormhole into paradise.

  God had first formed me in the womb

  small as a bite of burger.

  Once my lungs were done

  He sailed a soul like a lit arrow

  to inflame me. Maybe that piercing

  made
me howl at birth,

  or the masked creatures

  whose scalpel cut a lightning bolt to free me—

  I was hoisted by the heels and swatted, fed

  and hauled through rooms. Time-lapse photos show

  my fingers grew past crayon outlines,

  my feet came to fill spike heels.

  Eventually, I lurched out to kiss the wrong mouths,

  get stewed, and sulk around. Christ always stood

  to one side with a glass of water.

  I swatted the sap away.

  When my thirst got great enough

  to ask, a stream welled up inside;

  some jade wave buoyed me forward;

  and I found myself upright

  in the instant, with a garden

  inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs.

  The vines push out plump grapes.

  You are loved, someone said. Take that

  and eat it.

  MÉTAPHYSIQUE DU MAL

  Sometimes in the quadrangled globe you feel

  impossibly small, a mere pushpin with face

  embossed on top, jabbed in place.

  Say it’s night in the kitchen, and those sprawled pages

  hold notes for your oldest friend’s funeral—your fifth

  eulogy in five years. Bach’s

  measuring out cool intervals of pain.

  You stand too long in the freezerspill

  of smoky Arctic twilight—rows of plastic boxes

  old soups and gravies

  furred with frost, everything glazed in place.

  And in the fridge, how long has that stripped carcass

  shriveled there, legs widespread?

  In the pantry, the lychee nuts eyeball you,

  aloof in their ancient miasma of syrup.

  By dawn, pantries yawn on all sides. Bach’s shut off.

  Every dog-eared tome has been thumbed.

  The single page says only, I had a friend who died. Cancer

  ate her liver out. In your Timex

  the noise shifts, the minuscule hammers

  start tapping out now, now abruptly fast.

  (for Patti Mora)

  DESCENDING THEOLOGY: THE NATIVITY

  She bore no more than other women bore,

  but in her belly’s globe that desert night the earth’s

  full burden swayed.

  Maybe she held it in her clasped hands as expecting women often do

  or monks in prayer. Maybe at the womb’s first clutch

  she briefly felt that star shine

  as a blade point, but uttered no curses.

  Then in the stable she writhed and heard

  beasts stomp in their stalls,

  their tails sweeping side to side

  and between contractions, her skin flinched

  with the thousand animal itches that plague

  a standing beast’s sleep.

  But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid,

  the child knew nothing

  of its own fire. (No one ever does, though our names

  are said to be writ down before

  we come to be.) He came out a sticky grub, flailing

  the load of his own limbs

  and was bound in cloth, his cheek brushed

  with fingertip touch

  so his lolling head lurched, and the sloppy mouth

  found that first fullness—her milk

  spilled along his throat, while his pure being

  flooded her. (Each

  feeds the other.) Then he was left

  in the grain bin. Some animal muzzle

  against his swaddling perhaps breathed him warm

  till sleep came pouring that first draught

  of death, the one he’d wake from

  (as we all do) screaming.

  DELINQUENT MISSIVE

  Before David Ricardo stabbed his daddy

  sixteen times with a fork—Once

  for every year of my fuckwad life—he’d long

  showed signs of being bent.

  In school, he got no valentine nor birthday

  cake embellished with his name.

  On Halloween, a towel tied around his neck

  was all he had to be a hero with.