Manasseh Ridge

•

Maybe you wonder now, at my eyes,
my voice, or long to see my body
bare upon some sheets?

But you could not walk across
the rotted doorsill, into
my father's house. You couldn't
stand his face, grained
with black dust, the ghouls
ever in his eyes.

You couldn't love my mother, lost
for years among the brick churches
where keys rust, jutting from
the old locks, their hinges
filled with grit. She stares,
by heart, like the blind,
at a savage light, beyond
her vision.

I bear, on my breast, a birthmark.
If you failed to storm it with kisses
I would accuse you of neglect,
and if you did, of pity.

I was, by thirteen, perforce,
impure. You couldn't
mete out the pain I need.

I remember myself, a little girl,
at wakes and graves, who spaded
dirt on her shadow, as my brothers
wheezed and keeled over, playing
Black Lung.

You'll never see, in the watches
of the night, what we see.
You imagine powers that aren't in you.
What would you do? Braid
cold hair with warm hands?

Bake bread out of sweat
and coal ash, then crumble it
before me, your crippled hen?

Here, in the lee of the Wasatch,
nothing's higher than Manasseh Ridge,
where rain floods rills and flattens grass
on the courseways, nothing's lower
than this valley, with its boxcars,
open and empty, on the sidings,
with its coal seams and mud lots,
its potholes and wheelruts-
with its women, their breasts sucked
to rags by their babies.

I can see what you are,
and my love would become
your station-that wretchedness
you long for.