My neighbor next door rarely
wears a shirt, rarely picks up
the cigarette butts he grinds into the oil
in his driveway, never plucks the weeds
that grow from his side of the fence
to mine. Late at night we hear him holler
at the television or see him lighting fireworks
shirtless from the pitched hardpack of dirt that
is his yard. He drinks Keystone. In the evening
he drinks Keystone Light. His boys run shirtless
in front of cars without shoes & scream obscenities
at anyone who will stop to listen & they are skinned
& bruised & happy with the sun. These boys
never leave the house without hearing their father yell
out the door he loves them. These boys! I am
filled with hope for them, filled with love
for this terrible father who sees nothing
but the possibility of their greatness
even as he lets the roof leak upon their heads.
Under our feet, the wasteland
of herbicide deserts bloom, beneath
grasses lonely for the turn of the earthworm;
fungi spores burned down clean & neat; this
sanctified world free of pests. A man with a canister
on his back sprays dead the pill bugs under
stone, sprays death to whatever weed or insect
dares to spoil the squared edges of our nature.
There is the man who loves symmetry. There
is the man who loves the smell of sandy
sanitized earth. There is the man who
will give the potato bug their deserved death;
there is the man who will give the millipede
their death, who will risk giving the field mouse &
the sparrow their death, who will then give the bobcat
& the fox their death, who will give the eagle
& coyote their death. Given, the circle of killing.
A woman poisons the miller moth, decries the absence
of the goldfinch & the robin & the chipmunk &
the barn owl & the dark-eyed junko. For
the perfect yard, we poison the least of us,
my brethren, choke every root with amitrole,
salt the earth with mercury sulfide, ensure
the fire ant & the daddy long leg & the mycorrhizal
suffer for geometrical design, the invisible world
of the skeletal benzene vole hidden deep
under our Chuck Taylors, the badger eye bleeding
our poisons, HOA’s governing the cut of our yard
until the entire population holds true this anemic faith;
how else to prove that we are committed to the
proper job of keeping up these appearances?
A bent log rolls at the water-edge, thick branches
flapping in the water; a handful of lime wedges
linger at the sea edge, a hair tie, a plastic Skittles
wrapper paws along broken shells in shallow
water; the Gulf water beckons then shuns an old man’s
dingy, a teenaged girl learns to tease a boy & this memory
will be what he sees when he chokes his 1st, 3rd, 7th girlfriend;
the sun is bulging up into morning sky, the emerald
water laps quietly as dreams, a coffee cup tossed from
a pickup truck in northern Alabama plays in a breeze here
in Florida & the log turns again in the currents, a young girl
skips away from a jellyfish gummed to sand, then away from
a hamburger wrapper that hopscotches up the beach
until it is snagged by a runnel of water glazed with pesticide;
she will squeal in delight & horror when she realizes
the log is actually the body of an immense sea turtle,
eyes cloudy with all it has seen, body smacking on the beach
with each push of a wave, head bobbing back & forth
to a beat none of us can hear. There is a man on a boat
cutting bait in the last moments of his fight with a tuna,
a long line zipping past the swabbing head & bodies
of discarded fish; the coffee cup sluices past the flat fin
of the turtle, a fishing line trails out from her neck,
across the water, thin & red
& tethered to something
far away in his unconscious deep
If the world hates you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. —John 15:18
The pages of scripture thin as
the skin on an onion, the lord
hovering over us with love or hate
depending on whom we ask;
my god goes from warm
as summer concrete to cold
as an empty winter hive when I am
told Psalms guides us to ostracize
the sinner, to abandon them. A great
glass window divides us from the wind
complaining around the wooden shutters
of this seminary, the high school visible
across deep powdered streets, the dark of morning
cold as cracked lips pressed to a cheek.
We race to find selected scripture: a chase
through furious wrinkled pages—each
folded to find the words easily—a race
with no prizes. I know that the bible
has the word love written in it more
than three hundred times & hate more
than two hundred; I also know poetry is powered
by refrain. Our teacher is a lovely woman
& so terrified of both sin & the sinner
that during my senior year she will tell her
daughter that she is not allowed to talk
to me anymore. The book leather under my palm
is warm & I am tempted to scribble my own beliefs
under these old translations of confounded men,
manifest my own new good words in the spaces between:
it is love that summons our gods, love that guides
us to one another, that it is love, love, always
love. Because if it is not love, then it is a ruined
world unmade by all the wrong words.
Seth Brady Tucker’s third book is The Cruelty Virtues, published by 3:A Taos Press. He is the executive director of the Longleaf Writers’ Conference, and he teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop and at the Colorado School of Mines near Denver. He is the author of the books Mormon Boy and We Deserve the Gods We Ask For, and his poetry, fiction, and essays have recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review, LitMag, Driftwood, Copper Nickel, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others. He is originally from Wyoming and served as an Army Paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq.
Details from Images in William Saville-Kent’s The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893.)
