Tropic of Squalor: Poems by Mary Karr
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
&nb
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.
<
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