Ross Gay
OPENING
You might rightly wonder what I am doing here
in the passenger’s seat of this teal Mitsubishi
with the hood secured by six or seven thick strips of duct tape,
sitting next to Myself, who sits in the driver’s seat,
having quickly pulled into the lot of the Kentucky Fried Chicken
on Rt. 413 in Levittown, Pennsylvania,
from which years ago my father would sometimes
bring home a bucket of hot wings to share
just with me, his comrade in spice and grease and gore,
rattling the little charnel house like a bell
to indicate a joy impending and plucking
the lid to waft the scent toward the vents
into my room where I’d catch a whiff and toss my Avengers
comic to vault down the steps before high-fiving
my smiling old man, stinking of his own hours working
at the Roy Rogers down on Cottman, and plunge into the scuzzy muck,
the two of us silently cleaning the bones while the laugh track
of some re-run ebbed and flowed;
you wonder rightly what it is I am saying
quietly in the ear of Myself, and what I am pointing at
with one hand while the other rests on Myself’s shoulder,
tenderly if not a bit tentatively, for Myself
is still a very big man, and quick, and trying hard
not to take anyone with him over the ledge on which he stands,
which you can tell when he just barely looks in my direction
a bit animal with sweat glistening the back of his neck
and his temples, his jaw flexed with his hands
clutching the wheel, the slightest whistle in his breath
while beneath the looming sign of the Colonel smiling
like one concealing some awful and bloody secret
a family in the rearview parks their minivan
and not mostly noticing us makes their way out:
an older brother gripping the wrist of a smaller one
who clutches his purple and yellow jacket; an infant snugged
in its father’s arm tipping its head back to see us
from beneath its light blue cap, opening and closing its hand
as the glass doors swing shut behind them.
*
You likewise might wonder how Myself has arrived
at this flamboyant terror, an accretion
the way in caves, where nothing without light
is seen, minerals will gather into impossible spires
waiting to impale a thing, that he actually, while driving
home from his dear mother’s apartment, saw
in his mind with a clarity like the semis behind him
trudging toward the on-ramp to Philadelphia or New Jersey,
like the carts wandering about the PathMark lot or the woman
in a housedress and slippers waiting at the crosswalk
smoking a cigarette, his own hands working a vial
of some sort from which he poured a poison
into his mother’s half-eaten tub of blueberry yogurt,
which imagined matricide is perhaps especially jarring
to Myself, given the awkward walking he does
avoiding ants and other tiny beasts,
given the long prayer he found himself giving
the chickadee that met its death against his windshield,
lodging under the wiper blades and drumming the glass
with the one free wing until he could pull over, whereupon
Myself did kiss the unlucky thing, folding its wings into its body,
before laying it in a small hole at the foot of a dogwood tree
in full regalia, its thousand flowers like a congregation
walking arm in arm in the river.
*
And knowing Myself well now I can see
what murderous birds flew numerous and hungry
into the attic, shrikes especially, working
their ways in at the slimmest shims of light
between shingles and through rotholes wedging first
their heads in without blinking and collapsing
the bones of their bodies their tongues thrust out
and necks made long wriggling in leaving behind
clumps of shivering feathers blood-glued to the cracks
one after the next prying through loose boards
snapping at the tail feathers of the ones in front of them
the clawing feet skitting in one after the next
until the attic roared with soaring and the war
screams of birds clutching one another with talons
by the neck or back and veering quick
toward any piercing thing barb or thorn
or snapped branch jeering into the air like this
the impaled thing writhing and fluttering
once or twice its wings and twisting open its beak
from which came no sound—
which is, in fact, the wrong metaphor, the more I think of it,
for the birds in question favor the long view
of open meadows. They love exposed perches on which they fasten
their talons and unwrap their beautiful wings in the wind.
And the birds I’m talking about are not birds at all,
but common sorrow made murderous simply by nailing
the shingles tight, and caulking with the tar always boiling out back
all possible cracks. Which is to say, the metaphor here
has become the sealing up as much as any bird, has become
the way Myself had made unwittingly a habit of slathering
mortar everywhere, almost by accident,
for fear of what might forever slip in and be felt;
which was, in addition to everything else, simply, goddamn,
how sad my mother was when my father died, goddamn,
how sad was Myself; and how scared was Myself,
scared nearly, in fact, to death, at his mother afraid
or not sleeping well or not unpacking for months in her new apartment,
outside of which Myself, visiting, would sit in his car
for a half hour or more, staring
into the yellow aluminum siding’s patina and the seam
it made with the fake white brick
as he felt the bones of his chest breaking which was the feeling
of the very real terror he had at what his hands might do, which his hands
would never do, which was like the wood shake helpless against the prying
shrike, clawing and snapping its hunter’s beak, which, I am happy
to remind us both again, was not the feeling at all. All Myself was feeling,
in fact, was not feeling his heart break again and again.
The way he did for some time sitting with his mother
in her living room, watching the Eagles that year have a good season
while she sobbed and didn’t sleep well and in some way
shone in her sorrow complete though it was very hard
for him to admire for the roaring in his head, which was nothing
more, it turns out, than the sounds of not weeping, the sounds
of sadness turned back. Nothing savage, nothing cruel or vicious,
not a bird in sight—just sadness. Which is to say,
in other words, just being alive.
*
My Beloved Chickenshit; My Sweet
Little Chickenshit; don’t run,
My Baby. Don’t flee, My Honey.
Hunker down. Hunker Down.
*
There is, in my yard, a huge and beautiful peach tree.
I planted the thing as a three-foot whip,
a spindly prayer with a tangle of roots so delicate,
so wild, I took ten minutes to feather them apart
before spreading them in the hole like a lightning storm
in one of those images of the brain. Now the tree reaches almost
into the grumpy neighbor out back’s yard, the one who once
snarled at me and my house why would anyone paint a house that color?,
and whose unsmiling middle-aged daughter mows the lawn
twice a day, though I’ve seen in March or April
when the tree’s thousand pink mouths unfurl
and blow kisses to everyone in sight, the burdened curl
of the old lady’s back uncoil—I’ve seen her stand up some and wink
at that tree, and, no kidding, saw her once teeter out
in a gloomy gray pantsuit and, scrubbed by the bloom,
change her costume right then and there to something
frilled and blazing, which she wore on her trot
through the neighborhood whistling to the birds swirling
behind her. In this neck of the woods you have to prune
a peach tree if you don’t want the fruit to rot, if you don’t want
all that fragrant grandstanding to be for naught. Which is why
today, this sunny April afternoon with no rain or real freeze forecasted,
I dig out my tools and sharpening stone, making the blades
all shimmer enough to skim the hair from my arm.
Then, after cleaning each with a rag dipped in
some watered-down bleach, I move around the tree’s
sprawling limbs, the ruddy young growth all wagging
at the sun, all shivering with the breezes
muscling through. And with my loppers and snips I
look up into the behemoth tree and begin clipping,
first the wisps of growth and pencil thick sprouts, before hauling
myself into the tree, wedging my boot in the sturdy crotch and clinging
to a fat branch to keep thinning: overlapping
limbs or those with some hint of disease; those grown haywire
or deranged twisting toward the light; and those from which
last year grew maybe half a bushel of fruit, limbs
wrist thick with bark whorled and cleft by age,
but whose tight angle might snap this year
and wreck the tree, and require a saw to remove, which I do,
watching the last branch tumble into the pile of clippings below.
I do this again and again, crawling through the branches
as though through a beloved’s ribs. Friends, if you haven’t guessed,
every time I do this a little bit I mourn,
leaning the pruner’s steel flush against the flesh,
or working back and forth the saw’s grin and feeling
the smooth wood tumble or twirl into the little tomb which, after
the cutting is done, is about my size—is about the size,
give or take, of everyone I’ve ever loved. This is how, every spring,
I promise the fruit will swell with sugar: by bringing in the air and light—
until, like the old-timers say, the tree is open enough
for a bird to fly through. Which, in fact, they do—two cardinals
flirting; a blue jay flashing its pompadour; one of those little greyish birds
I can’t remember the name of, landing on the furthest limbs
where it does nothing special besides maybe dump its teeny
chamber pot while whistling this very ditty:
half dirge, half disco, some giggly trill
loop-de-looping from its tiny beak,
while its ruffled, musty body sways on the tree’s furthest finger,
resting exactly where I put it,
singing just as I asked it to,
which, from up here, where the newly open view is good, I can see
is what I was pointing to, what I was saying quietly to Myself,
in the parking lot of the KFC in Levittown, Pennsylvania,
as Myself shivered, and looked up, trying to see,
trying to hear.