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| for my brothers John and Bob |
Ben Harris ate hawks
with his jaw bones working like saw blades at the mill
where he got a hernia and earned the right
to rest from all work forever |
with his teeth too poor to be false
grinding on the backs of birds never meant by God
to be eaten. |
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Ben Harris ate hawks with his hat on
that blew off the head of a rich man fishing down at Double Lake
in 1935.
It was a perfect fit. |
How did you get up on those light poles Ben
to set the traps we boys shot away later with our guns?
How could you catch a wounded hawk by its claws
cut off the wings and put them dried beneath your pillow?
You could have had chickens by the hundreds
gone wild in pine trees where you couldn’t walk
without getting shit at! |
Ben took a bath two times a year in Stephen’s Creek with his
long johns on.
He’d rub his chest with a bar of soap my Grandma made
out of hog lard and lye
in the black kettle in her yard
near the tree where she hung her chickens up
to cut off their heads and throw them on the smoke house roof
so my brothers and I had to climb to see
how their beaks kept clucking and their eyes spun in circles
looking for the hand that no longer held them.
The spinning of their eyes like the spinning of planets
like a whirling of stars around the throne of heaven! |
I see you now Ben picking up chicken heads in a tow sack
slinging the bag full of silent clucking over your shoulder
dumping the heads into a vat of skinned squirrels
with their heads still on
adding chunks of possum and armadillo meat
to be eaten with the dumplings Mrs. Hillendager gave you
for drawing water up from her well.
She was a Catholic and you pronounced her name
“Hilldigger”. |
He lived with his brother Rob
who smoked a pipe with a foot long stem made from a turkey’s leg bone.
They slept in an 8x8x7 foot shack
with their chickens and their chicken eating dogs
and their guinea hens and the lame squirrel
they wouldn’t kill
and a million seed ticks and the hoots of owls
and pine sap rising from the boards
they borrowed from the mill one night
while the moon chuckled in a sweetgum tree
and the picture of their Mother hung on a nail
whose maiden name nobody knew
and shotguns hung on antlers from another county
and the smell of Vicks Vapor Rub and the smell of woodsmoke
and linament and the smell of turpentine for head lice
and the smell of snuff they never used around my Ma
and cough syrup and rubbing alcohol
and the smell of horse and cow and chicken shit
and the smell of old, old men no one would marry. |
But someone had married Ben.
One of the Blanks women just before the first world war.
Ben worked at the sawmill and hunted squirrels at night
to feed the sons that she delivered.
But she died of ear ache that got into her brain
and the boys grew up to despise him.
When they were old enough they moved to Huntsville
to be in the prison
one for stealing a man’s truck the other to guard him.
Later on they moved again to Houston
to sell liquor and rise up into the middle class. |
I remember you Ben
one hand saying “No Aunt Mary!”
the other going in an arc to take a nickel from my Grandma’s hand
for bringing mail up from the store.
I remember your fingers trimmed by a saw blade
and the scar across your palm where a hawk got you!
You used to take a mule by its back hooves
and hold it till it couldn’t buck!
I remember the hawk feather in your hat
and the smell of you even pine-o-pine couldn’t kill.
Ma wouldn’t let us drink out of the same ghord dipper
as you until she boiled it.
I remember your overalls and your shoes like starved dogs.
You never had on any socks in winter. |
I don’t want to tell how your sons put you in a home
where you cried and couldn’t remember your name
how they put you in a cardboard coffin without a suit on
how the bulldozers came to scrape your shack away
and on that spot is a man made lake
with trailer houses along its shore. |
I remember your eyes like my Grandma’s eyes
the color of milk left outside for dogs
with the sky in it. |
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