BRICKrhetoric

The aster was my favorite, long before they were grave-coverers
It would be the name of my future daughter, even though Mama had told me
It was a terrible name for a red-wrinkled baby
But all names are terrible for red-wrinkled things that grew from the Nothing and
The Impure, like the penguins told us at the corner Catholic Church
When they shook their heads at us, the illegitimate bastards of the acidic
60’s (though we knew it couldn’t be called that, because more people saw God naked
In those years than in any others)
But we were bastards nevertheless in that neighborhood
Unrivaled and unrated
Clamoring for nudity in a seldom naked town of Bibles and coughing
Cyprus trees, drunk from the spilled beer whose disallowance
Rubbed our tongues, and stupefied us happily for a minute too physical
To be anything less than a year
We didn’t dare ask questions of the world, except for on those
Few dark nights when our brothers headed out for war, leaving us with the rasp
Of a different breath, clicking its tongue as bait.
What was that sound, we asked on more than one forbidden days, petrified
Like the greasy wood of faraway boats, stiff-necked and raw-skinned
And knowing everything except the name of that sound
Kicking up smoke in the far-off dust, chewing its lips
To pacify its sticky thirst and hunger
But we regained our sense and planted the seasonal asters
Thinking it would never find us,
The unshaved youth, whose meat was rancid and only good for looking at
And looking on, untouchable, to say the least
Since that was all we’d learned to say about ourselves
In the wordless war
But nobody told us that the distant fearful growl was the gurgle
Of a red and pulsing blood, ripping and roaring in outward-travel to the big cities,
The small towns, the altar and the office, the storybooks and bedside chairs of the children
And nobody told us that blood was boiling, aiming straight
To plug into our jugulars and dilute the battered unrhythm
Of the timeless youth
We thought we’d always have.
Our backs were turned, our faces toward the town where we were kings
Unbaptized and undressed except for the rosy cloaks of sunburn
That licked us at Sheep’s Creek in the summers. But the beast’s tongue rolled wet
With the words of trembling men
And it became the fifth season, when everyone’s sons
Came home holey like Swiss cheese, and for the Hawks, like Jesus
And I was proud of my brother, because his face was clean enough
For open casket, hardly a scratch except a red ribbon by his hairline
Which Mama called wretched and wretched, never deciding between the two
Until she abandoned both and threw some asters on his grave
And died in her rocking chair with red-ribboned wrists, thin as a leafless flower
Kept alive in a jar of water, just like we had been then, when we leaned
Precariously on our thrones made of straw, just long enough to see them
Blown away in the Godless churches, sifted through the fabric of those wretched
And wretched folded flags, silent that year
When the minerals of family blood sailed away and burned,
Leaving us with the known and unknown memories of freshly cut men
In the haze of the pitted Mother Jungle.