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Show Go Love/148 19 Outside, I drink the air and light A horse neighs in the field across the highway and I begin to pick the cigarette buts up one by one and throw them in the sand-filled ashtray at the far end of the concrete stoop. So many cigarettes, each one a prayer? A healthy cedar-I can't remember this tree, was it here for Jimmy's viewing or has it grown since?-rises in the middle of the circle drive. As if here for me alone to see, a red-headed woodpecker hammers the hard trunk, maybe fifteen feet off the ground, a sound that marries my childhood to this moment. The woodpecker, what Grandpa Stepwell'd call peckerwood. which just as easily became peckerhead out of his mouth, is going to town, a jackhammer of blood and bone and feather up high in the hickory fork, sunlight full on its red head, surely making enough sustained noise to get through the funeral home walls, up into the deluxe caskets in the fish room, through even the false membranes of Mama's sealed shut ears in the Exquisite Farewell Room with O.W. I hope like goddamn hell so, that woodpecker music's like that for the sleepers. "Hep you?" The monkey man who's been polishing limos hops up on the stoop, a little whisk broom and dustpan in one hand. |
