Tropic of Squalor: Poems Read online

  Dedication

  For Dev & Sarah & Amy every dang day,

  for Don DeLillo & Philip Roth on holy days,

  & (wincingly enough) for Jesus:

  you all keep me kneeling down and looking up

  Epigraph

  Carl Jung carved this Latin inscription above the door to his Swiss house: Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit.

  “Summoned or not summoned, the god will be there.”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Organ Donor’s Driver’s License Has a Black Check

  Loony Bin Basketball

  The Burning Girl

  Illiterate Progenitor

  Read These

  Discomfort Food for the Unwhole

  The Devil’s Delusion

  Dear Oklahoma Teen Smashed on Reservation Road

  The Age of Criticism

  Exurbia

  Lord, I Was Faithless

  Suicide’s Note: An Annual

  The Awakening (after Milosz)

  How God Speaks

  Face Down

  The Child Abuse Tour

  The Less Holy Bible

  I. Genesis: Animal Planet

  II. Numbers: Poison Profundis

  III. Leviticus: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

  IV. Exodus: Bolt Action

  V. Chronicles: Hell’s Kitchen

  VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God

  VII. Judges: Awe and Disorder

  VIII. Obadiah: A Perfect Mess

  IX. Ecclesiastes: Amok Run

  X. Psalms: Carnegie Hall Rush Seats

  XI. Hey Jude: Prophetic Interlude by the Ghost of Walt Whitman

  XII. Malachi: Truckload of Nails

  XIII. Hebrews: The Mogul

  XIV. Lamentations: The More Deceived

  XV. Kings: The Obscenity Prayer

  XVI. Marks and Johns: The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God about the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives

  XVII. Acts: The Like Button

  XVIII. Petering: Recuperation from the Sunk Love Under the Aegis of Christ and Isaac Babel

  XIX. Philemon: Notes from the Underground

  XX. Revelation: The Messenger

  Coda Toward the New New Covenant: Death Sentence

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Karr

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Organ Donor’s Driver’s License Has a Black Check

  Forgive me, black ant at the base of my yoga mat:

  if the Buddhists are right, and you had a soul,

  I’m a killer. And you, young buck whose suede neck

  through the rifle’s scope I might otherwise

  have stroked. Forgive me juicy burger medium rare.

  I fell off the vegan wagon for want of you.

  I devoured your iron to fuel my weak blood.

  Jet-lagged from the Paris flight, I slumped

  and felt your sacrifice worthy. How’d you go?

  A bolt through the skull and your big corpus

  on the blood-gelled floor of the abattoir.

  Countless ducks flying their arrowheads

  across the gray sky found their emerald necks

  in my bird dog’s mouth. I liked what Dean said

  to the squirrel we found thrashing on the path

  off the quad. He’d stopped to look down—

  his lips blue from his failing heart as if he had eaten

  nothing but Bomb Pops for a week. Some beast

  must have crunched down on the squirrel’s neck,

  and Dean bent like a waiter to say (sans

  irony) I honor your struggle, little brother.

  Loony Bin Basketball

  (for Phil Jackson)

  The gym opened out

  before us like a vast arena, the bleached floorboards

  yawned toward a vanishing point, staggered seats high

  as the Mayan temple I once saw devoured by vines.

  Each of us was eaten up inside — all citizens of lost

  and unmapped cities.

  Frank hugged the pimply ball

  over his belly like an unborn child. Claire

  dressed for day care in daffodil yellow and jelly shoes.

  David’s gaze was an emperor’s surveying a desiccated

  battlefield. Since he viewed everything that way, we all

  saw him the same.

  The psych techs in cloroxed white

  were giant angels who set us running drills, at which

  we sucked. The zones we set out to defend were watery

  at every edge. We missed close chest passes, easy combos.

  Our metronomes run different tempos,

  John proclaimed.

  Then Claire started seeing

  dashes stutter through the air behind the ball.

  Then speed lines on our backs, and then her own head

  went wobbly as a spinning egg. She’d once tracked

  planetary orbits for NASA and now sat sidelined

  by her eyes’ projections.

  Only Bill had game.

  Catatonic Bill whose normal talent was to schlub

  days in a tub chair — his pudding face scarred

  with chicken pox — using his hand for an ashtray,

  belly for an armrest. Now all that peeled away, and he

  emerged, clean as an egg.

  He was a lithe

  and licorice boy, eeling past all comers, each shot

  sheer net. He faked both ways, went left. Beneath the orange

  rim his midair pirouettes defied the gravity that I

  could barely sludge through. He scored beyond what even

  Claire could count,

  then he bent panting,

  hands on knees as the orderlies held out water cups,

  and the rest of us reached to pat his back or slap

  his sweaty hand, no one minding about the stench or his

  breath like old pennies. Then as quick as that

  he went.

  Inside his head

  some inner winch did reel him back from the front

  of his face bones where he’d been ablaze. He went back and

  back into that shadowed stare. Lucky we were to breathe

  his air. Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was

  the self I’d come in

  wanting to kill, and I left him there.

  The Burning Girl

  While the tennis ball went back and forth in time

  A girl was burning. While the tonic took its greeny

  Acid lime, a girl was burning. While the ruby sun fell

  From a cloud’s bent claws and Wimbledon was won

  And lost, we sprawled along the shore in chairs,

  We breathed the azure air alongside

  A girl with the thinnest arms all scarred and scored

  With marks she’d made herself—

  She sat with us in flames

  That not all saw or saw but couldn’t say at risk

  Of seeming impolite. And later we all thought

  Of the monk who’d doused himself with gas,

  Lit a match, then sat unmoving and alert amid

  Devouring light. She didn’t speak. She touched

  No aspect of our silly selves.

  We were a herd of hardly troubled rich.

  She was an almost ghost her mother saw

  Erasing the edges of herself each day

  Smudging the lines like charcoal while her parents

  Redrew her secretly into being over and

  Again each night and dawn and sleepless

&
nbsp; All years long. Having seen that mother’s love,

  I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’ve

  Brought to life the deadest Christ, and she

  Emptied herself into that blazing child with all her might

  And stared a hundred million miles into

  The girl’s slender, dwindling shape.

  Her father was the devoted king of helicopter pad

  And putting green. His baby burned as we

  All watched in disbelief.

  I was the facile friend insisting on a hug

  Who hadn’t been along for years of doctors, wards,

  And protocols. I forced her sadness close. I said

  C’mon let’s hug it out. Her arms were white

  Birch twigs that scissored stiffly at my neck till she

  Slid on. That night we watched

  Some fireworks on the dewy lawn for it was

  Independence Day. By morning she was gone.

  She was the flaming tower we all dared

  To jump from. So she burned.

  Illiterate Progenitor

  My father lived so far from the page,

  the only mail he got was marked OCCUPANT.

  The century had cored him with its war, and he paid

  bills in person, believed in flesh and the family plan.

  In that house of bookish females, his glasses slid on

  for fishing lures and carburetor work,

  the obits, my report cards, the scores.

  He was otherwise undiluted by the written word.

  At a card table, his tales could entrance a ring of guys

  till each Timex paused against each pulse,

  and they’d stare like schoolboys even as he wiped

  from the center the green bills anted up.

  Come home. I’m lonely, he wrote in undulating script.

  I’d left to scale some library’s marble steps like Everest

  till I was dead to the wordlessness

  he was mired in, which drink made permanent.

  He took his smoke unfiltered, milk unskimmed.

  He liked his steaks marbled, fatback on mustard greens,

  onions eaten like apples, split turnips dipped

  into rock salt, hot pepper vinegar on black beans.

  Read These

  (for DFW)

  The King did say

  and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom

  where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love

  before at last taking himself away. His head away. His

  recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine

  themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more

  than instruments of his creation. Pawns.

  Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us

  studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.

  Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down

  from the high dive. The contest was seriousness

  he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius

  and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins.

  Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping

  his name in literary mention nonstop on the world wide web.

  He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider

  and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in

  its thread and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. His head

  kecked back and howling from inside the bone castle from

  whence he came

  to hate the court he held.

  His loneliness was an invisible crown

  rounding his brow tighter than any turban,

  more binding than a wedding band,

  and he sat becircled by his tower

  on the rounding earth.

  Read these,

  did say the King, and put down his pen, hearing

  himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest

  aspects of the tax code

  with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable

  as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex.

  I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face.

  And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc

  bag was an air-tight chamber

  for the regal head—most serious relic,

  breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.

  Discomfort Food for the Unwhole

  To check out, we line up our carts,

  Each head bent over a shining phone.

  Through these squares of light, we tap

  Tap with opposable thumbs, and though each

  Human unit occupies a small space, a few

  Floor tiles, each believes that through the glow

  In her hands she can reach far, so from-this-place

  Far. Our sprawling alphabets include hearts

  Or dollar signs or cartoon thumbs turned up or down

  To vote some Barabbas alive or dead. But ours

  Is a city of I-beams and mirrored towers.

  Behind us stretch rows of iced Gulf shrimp, New

  Zealand lamb, the Russian sturgeon’s glistening

  Black eggs, dewy orchids misty from Brazil—

  So much from so many for so few and at such

  Spectacular cost, and yet we cannot lift our heads

  From our hands to look around. We cannot stop

  Ourselves—each face hung forward off the neck

  Of the corpse each self devours.

  The Devil’s Delusion

  I lie on my back in the lawnchair to study

  the trees claw up toward Heaven

  They have all the sap I lack

  It’s doubt I send rivering cloudways

  in great boiling torrents as if all creation

  were a bad stage set I could wave way away

  then I could cast my dark spells in a blink

  and a flaming fingersnap—and

  a universe de Mare pops up

  so I win the everlasting argument against all

  that was or will be or tiredly is

  As if my soul would not in that blink

  be obliterateAs if as the kids say

  Dear Oklahoma Teen Smashed on Reservation Road

  Dean’s heart had been long years stiffening in its cage,

  and he wheeled around a contraption

  like a bumpy vacuum cleaner or rolling luggage

  with shunts from the box to his chest

  into the very meat of him, and through a clear plastic circle

  strapped to his solar plexus,

  Dean’s hot blood went round and round in stutter step.

  I held it once to warm my hands.

  With each artificial throb, I composed an ode,

  not for Dean’s death, but for the boy

  who lived reckless enough to die and plant a part

  in the gasping poet’s flesh. Next,

  Dean phoned from the squeaking gurney

  being rolled toward the blue

  antiseptic light, the gods in green masks. Take

  care of Laurie, he said. I said,

  Don’t be a dick, this is not Terms of Endearment,

  and you’re not Debra Winger.

  Then click, he entered the ether. I lay in my house

  hearing ice cubes avalanche down

  the fridge chute and every clock whisper and his wife’s

  phone powered off. The boy was shocked

  into sinus rhythm and beats on in Dean’s otherwise

  scooped-out chest: Israel is built on bones.

  The Age of Criticism

  Franz calls to say my new book is quote

  the worst thing he’s ever read close quote.

  His hollering makes my plastic earpiece quiver.

  It’s not that bad, I claim. But have I compared it

  with the great prose works (Tolstoy, etcet.). Sure,

  I said, it sucks—at which he slams the receiver down.
>
  The message Franz once left

  most everybody we knew—Your envy of my work

  must be terrible for you—his ex-girlfriend actually got printed

  on a tee shirt. He’d left her for a rich, adoring student

  that fall, and on New Year’s, Franz insulted Tom’s wife,

  so Tom chased him around a table laden with Triscuits

  and jug wines of the most sordid variety, till tall,

  barrel-chested Askald stopped Tom, palm

  to flannel-shirt chest, to say—with a drunk’s

  well-chewed precision—You’re wrecking my high.

  Tom then lunged out into the snow to walk it off.

  People started again stabbing cheese cubes

  with red and green toothpicks, and somebody’s blowsy wife

  who’d cornered the Nobel laureate went back

  to twirling a lock of just-then-graying hair

  over his forehead, while in the bedroom,

  her husband snored on a mattress sprawled

  with pea coats and thrift-store furs. Tom

  was supposed to die, but didn’t; Deborah wasn’t,

  but did. Candlelit and slim in oxblood riding boots,

  she wore a near see-through black silk blouse

  with loose coils of red hair tumbling down the back.

  She was about to dump the two smart guys who’d left

  their wives for her. Hearing her quote Baudelaire that night,

  I believed there might be no one more alluring alive.

  But she killed herself. Last April, widowed at sixty,

  she jumped off the high stadium of some snotty college

  where she taught, and whether she died from grief

  or scorn for self or someone gone, it still seems dumb.

  Even Askald’s sober now. And nobody invited Franz

  anywhere for years before cancer took him,

  though we often emailed each other his crisp,

  venomous posts to reviewers. Everybody

  claimed to forgive Franz because his father

  bailed and his stepdad beat him. And critics

  hoping to stave off one of his nasty, articulate

  rants persisted on calling him a genius because, hey,

  what if he was? But we all thought him an asshole,

  which makes us assholes too. That’s how criticism works.

  Sit in a room voting this word or that onto

  or off the page, you become a beauty cop,

  a scold, charged to carry that appraising gaze