Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr

  some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living….

  (for John Engman, 1949–1996)

  WHO THE MEEK ARE NOT

  Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent

  under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep

  in the rice paddy muck,

  nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles

  make the wheat fall in waves

  they don’t get to eat. My friend the Franciscan

  nun says we misread

  that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.

  To understand the meek

  (she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop

  in a meadow, who—

  at his master’s voice—seizes up to a stunned

  but instant halt.

  So with the strain of holding that great power

  in check, the muscles

  along the arched neck keep eddying,

  and only the velvet ears

  prick forward, awaiting the next order.

  HYPERTROPHIED FOOTBALL STAR AS SERIAL KILLER

  1. Double Sessions

  Sometimes the coach whapped his earhole;

  or many linemen bulldozed his form

  like a training sled, face mask turning up sod

  for yards. When his brain bounced hard enough

  the lights snapped out, and he was sidelined.

  Still, if the whistle reached his sleeping ears, he’d bolt

  from stretcher to green field helmetless.

  Put me in, he’d say. That’s heart,

  said the coach, for whom a hit meant love.

  2. Romancing the Skull

  In bed, our football star spoke wordless rain

  till a cool moon burned in a lady’s pelvic lake.

  Then he was ape again, the bringer

  of bruises with an icepick stare.

  He loved his women drugged enough

  to pin like bugs, and found one starved:

  picture a death’s head in a velvet cape,

  the only one he didn’t kill, since she came

  dead already. His face would bear the scars

  her talons clawed the night he threw her out,

  and she cut her wrist with an oiled and scented blade,

  so the slit might exude rose attar

  and not the stink of graves.

  3. Keening, Nascent Time

  For weeks, he’d boil the skull, row it

  to his private island, swing it from a tree limb

  with other skulls above his hammock.

  When he ran wind sprints in surf,

  to feint and dodge his ghost opponents,

  he felt the black eyeholes watching.

  His own hair began to shed like leaves,

  and his chest was snow, and winter

  ran his face, and though he scrubbed himself

  with mint, he could not clean the death off.

  One night he knelt between

  the legs of one he’d unrolled

  all his ones for, and begged, Put it in, but softness

  kept him out. He did her quick and left her head

  attached, then rowed home bald and small.

  4. Pathos Unbound

  After the dropped oars came the island hours

  when the mother tempest spun inside his head,

  and he strapped on pads to charge at phantoms

  bursting into spray, and bashed his face mask

  till the mouth guard bent, but could not kill

  the girl in him. He ended limping into slosh,

  which ruffled his crotch in its yellowed cup.

  The first wave to slap his chest made him

  a babe again in water wings, paddling toward

  the dwindling V of his father’s arms.

  Through darkening jade, he fell

  weightless, as if bounding from the end zone

  to catch a ball. It’s said

  when the mystery finally speaks,

  you hear the void you’ve spoken

  every longing into, silence articulate.

  From his helmet’s dead earphone

  the words: Just go out long, I’ll find you.

  ORDERS FROM THE INVISIBLE

  Insert coin. Mind the gap. Do not disturb

  hung from the doorknob of a hotel room,

  where a man begged to die entwined in my arms.

  He once wrote

  he’d take the third rail in his teeth, which is how

  loving him turned out.

  The airport’s glass world

  glided me gone from him, and the sky I flew into

  grew a pearly cataract through which God

  lost sight of us. The moving walk

  is nearing its end.

  The diner jukebox says, Choose

  again, and the waitress hollers over,

  “All them soul songs got broke.”

  She speaks from the cook’s window, steam

  smearing her face of all feature.

  The tongue is a form of fire, the Bible says,

  and in the computer’s unstarred blue

  the man’s brutal missives drag me along by my throat.

  Press yes to erase.

  REQUIEM: PROFESSOR WALT MINK (1927–1996)

  My friend’s eyelids were closed

  with these thumbs, which left

  faint whirlpools of skin oil.

  It’s okay. He’d stopped

  seeing: The lifelong film unreeling behind his gaze

  had stopped (sprocket jam, gear freeze, dim

  to black). So the last frame burned out

  (as I picture it) white on the brain’s bulb.

  No one could fix it, though this friend was a scientist,

  and I’d watched his hands repair

  the skull circuits of mice small as my thumb.

  That was in my youth and in his tutelage.

  And everyone he touched

  seemed changed by it—brighter, faster, more

  capable of love. Thinking of him

  I feel pliable again.

  I long for hands imbued

  with grace to shape me.

  And I worry the form I’ll finally take (death

  lesson) and whether I can be made to leave

  on anyone some mark worth bearing.

  PLUCK

  That spring snow fell late and long to clog

  every road away from the house my marriage

  had withered in

  and whose mortgage

  I could scarce afford. Because my son

  was young and my academic check

  went poof each month

  about day ten,

  I developed pluck—

  a trait much praised in Puritan texts,

  which favor the spiritual clarity

  suffering brings.

  Pluck also keeps the low-cost, high-producing poor

  digging post holes or loading deep-fat fryers

  or holding tag sales where their poor

  peers come to haggle over silver pie-slicers

  once boxed special for a bride. This

  wasn’t real

  poverty in America, but it soured my shrunk soul

  to its nub. Nights, I lay on my mattress

  on the floor, studying the clock face

  with its flipping digits. One day I woke to sun

  Then grass pushed up,

  and my son trapped dozens of crickets

  in a pickle jar’s sharp, upended air.

  In an old aquarium, he laid a shaggy carpet

  of clover, apple hunks, and a mustard lid filled

  with water—

  covered with a screen, weighed

  with the dictionary so the cats couldn’t get in.

  On Mothering Sunday, when one is obliged

  to revere whatever bitch brought one

  to this hard world,

  my son led me down to a room

  where crickets sang as if I were the sun.


  Which I was, I guess, to him,

  and him to me. After that, when a creditor rang

  to bark his threats,

  I set the phone down on the counter

  so he could hear the crude creatures plucked

  from the weeds by the boy, and what they sang.

  DESCENDING THEOLOGY: CHRIST HUMAN

  Such a short voyage for a god,

  and you arrived in animal form so as not

  to scorch us with your glory.

  Your mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk,

  sticky eyes smeared blind,

  limbs rendered useless in swaddle.

  You came among beasts

  as one, came into our care or its lack, came crying

  as we all do, because the human frame

  is a crucifix, each skeletos borne a lifetime.

  Any wanting soul lain

  prostrate on a floor to receive a pouring of sunlight

  might—if still enough,

  feel your cross buried in the flesh.

  One has only to surrender,

  you preached, open both arms to the inner,

  the ever-present hold,

  out-reaching every want. It’s in the form

  embedded, love adamant as bone.

  In a breath, we can bloom and almost be you

  (for Paul Goggi)

  MISS FLAME, APARTMENT BOUND, AS UNDISCOVERED PORN STAR

  Here in my lonely bed one day, I sprawled in silks.

  There was a fire escape but no flame. Outside,

  a world of brick. Through the sweatshop window

  across the way, a man’s face popped up, as if to study

  my stalled lust. His stay was brief. Another face.

  The men were taking turns—did they vie and jostle

  for the briefest sight of me? Should I take myself in hand

  and writhe? (On the net, I’d seen for sale The Little Minx

  Stripper Pole. For a hundred bucks, I could buy a stake

  for my gyrations, and show these strangers how an American slut

  unwinds.) But it was day. The whole sun fell between us, filled

  the alley: My windows were a total blank,

  which was what my last lover saw—a brick himself.

  Like him, the men were blind to me, taking turns at the pissoir.

  REFERENCE FOR EX-MAN’S NEXT

  after Catullus

  When you climb the next lady’s steps

  with your frat boy bounce, fist

  gripped around some peonies, fresh steaming dough

  baked on your homely stone for her

  alone, she should know that vows you spout

  would fill a stadium empty

  as your chest; that the good emails you sent

  to grease her up (“’twas but a dream

  of thee” and that ripe crap) were writ by Donne

  and meant no more than worms

  you’d feed a stupid fish; that the hot girl slang

  you’ll naked whisper came

  from Bambi (sexysluts.com) and has been pitched

  as underhand and low to schoolgirls

  you did con to bed—and yes, to me: dumb cunt.

  WINTER TERM’S END

  The student pokes her head into my cubicle.

  She’s climbed the screw-thread stairs that spiral up

  to the crow’s nest where I work to say goodbye.

  She hands back books I lent.

  I wave her to move papers from the spot

  she always took, worrying a sentence or a line;

  or come with protruded tongue to show

  a silver stud;

  or bamboozled by some guy who can’t appreciate

  the dragon tattooed on her breast, the filigree

  around her thigh. This term she’s done with school.

  Four years she’s siphoned every phrase,

  or anecdote, or quote that’s mine to dole.