From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Summer-Autumn 1996, Vol. XIX, No. 3/4
1.
Remember, he said, Lot’s wife, which is
as much
as to say, Look back, and at your peril,
on the rigors of the backward look.
Two men
in a bed and the one
shall be taken, the other left. Two daughters
and their father’s
seed. How is it in this second
world, the one where we start over, that
we still
can’t get the story right? Who
cannot read shall not
be saved.
Who comes down from the housetop
to gather his things for flight shall be
lost.
But where? said the twelve.
Wherever the body is, there,
said the one.
And there (but whose?) the chapter
ends, the body turned to salt again.
2.
(Cuylerville, New York)
Three months before the mine caved in,
the miner’s wife
sent letters to the Post-Dispatch:
The underground ceilings, she wrote, have cracked;
they’re drilling
at the salt supports that keep the chambers
stable. But ice was bad that winter and the pay
was good.
The midnight blasting barely
set our sleep on edge until, just shy
of dawn
one night, the roar
beneath the village and its salted roads
convinced us
we were done for. Two women
shall be grinding and the one
shall be taken,
the other left. And look at us now.
Sinkholes big as parking lots, the wells
sucked dry,
beds that were once a Devonian sea
dissolving in the aquifer.
You’ve heard
what they called it, the prophets of doom
and eco-disaster, when word
of the new-style
mining got out? They called it “pillar robbing,”
and (we’re all adept at hindsight now)
they got
it right. Two men in a field: the one
shall be taken, the other . . . The other
thing left
to contemplate is fire and brimstone, honest to
God: hydrogen sulfide burning off for
twenty-one
months, you’ve never smelled the like of it.
3.
The old law left some haggling room (If you
find there ten
who are righteous will you stay your hand?) and Lot
leaned hard on his angels.
I cannot
escape to the mountain, he told them; Let
me escape to the city nearby, it is
a little
one. But the woman Is it not
looked back a little one? Little enough.
Now which
strikes you as tempting fate?
4.
“For Olaf,” on the flyleaf, “Merry Christmas,
1943,”
and off to Guam, whose damps
wreaked all this havoc with the leather
spine.
Shipped out by way of Oakland, where
a blue-eyed sailor lately off the
farm
encountered passes of a whole new sort. I doubt
he did much reading. On
the jungle’s
edge, once night set in, they’d stare
through the tropical downpour at a makeshift
screen: Miss
Carole Lombard take
us home. Perimeter fan club of native
Chamorros,
and, just beyond the barbed-wire fence,
the groundling Japanese (“we caught
one in
the chow line once”), who crept back
to the trees when the credits came on.
By the light
of a lab in New Mexican desert One
shall be, Admiral one shall be Nimitz,
take us home.
5.
Will it be in our lifetime? they wanted
to know,
and who, but the most embarrassed
of masters, could blame them? Does he
thank
the servant because he served?
Intractable meantime (neither
would you),
embarrassment makes us cruel.
For forty years, my father talked so much
about dying,
talked loud in his whiskey, talked matter-of-
fact in his woods, and always with
such flat
satisfaction, you’d think he was sizing up acreage
and yield. I thought he’d be impatient with our
salt
farewells. But he was simply ready.
