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A Storied Hour
“When the doctors came they said she had died
of heart disease - of the joy that kills.”
― The Story of an Hour
In an hour Cormac McCarthy will walk us in
the Orchard and tell us he sees
three thin skins of ancient peach
take to their each and own beds and close
and fold the cold over them like men
with no teeth
In an hour Flannery O'Connor will till her hill-
billy tongue with an Aquinas claw
cultivator and let him take her
to bed and till her until she glows from Vespers
to Matins, and inside her bruised biceps are
finally unclasped from the red wolf's jaw
In an hour Rita Dove will thumb the curios
in an ancient case after case of
relics of capital land and velvet kneelers
slumped and dimpled under a Bronto bone
while some one's on their way through
to whistling Dixie through squeezed
cheeks, their molar bones a forensic
dentist's (years on mind) butter and dough
In an hour George Oppen will sing his "Ballad"
and I'll tell you I know this one I know
it and I'll tilt into it like I was born
there like I was home and like I was
kinda kin to Bishop stripped from her Fundy
people when her mother's jaw was zipped
shut in the madhouse or Oppen gone some
to Mexico a long long ride from the Island
and the lobsterman's rotten teeth
And Jesus in an hour a girl will shoot her mother
(accidentally she'd been led to believe)
and black honey will cure her every disease
and Eudora Welty will cover her grieving
mother with a green curtain and in an hour
a mystic Siminopio will let his bees
breathe for him and be his lipless upper lip
and he'll keen for them when they leave and they will
they will leave and not discreetly and he'll forget,
for the love of them, how to eat
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