The Tree Surgeon's Gift (eBook)

Table of Contents 10
Foreword 12
Part I — Relationships 14
The Lame Shall Enter First 15
Lights Over Quantico, USMC 16
Turnip Patch Kids 17
The Night Light 18
Lillian's Chair 19
Windless Orchards 20
Bad Apples 21
The Hyacinth Girl 22
Pink Flamingos 23
Kiss of Kin 24
Polio Summers 25
Part II — Rituals 26
The Tree Surgeon's Gift 27
The Risk of Green 28
Shade Tree Mechanics 29
Inside the Gun Factory 30
Seasons of the Hunter 31
The Duck Corps Rupture 32
After Berrypicking 33
Never Once 34
Storm Windows 35
The Whore's Coo 36
Choptank Oyster Dredgers 37
Bartholomew's Cobbler 38
End to Melancholy Questions 39
The Tree Surgeon's Alibi 40
Death of Cold 41
Waifs 42
Part III — Places 43
White Trash in Summer 44
Winter Fields: Getting Through 45
Building a Fencerow 46
Catching a Flick in Morelia 47
Getting Mad and Even 48
If He Hollers, Let Him Go 49
Mail at My New Address 50
Hanging Gardens 51
Little Haiti 52
Not Out of the Woods 53
Caution Lights 54
Little Boy Blue 55
Something Wrong 56
Summons to Enigma 57
Part IV — Biography 58
Fallen Angels 59
Teeth of the Hydra 60
At the Moon's Gate 61
The Strange Case of Doctor Mudd 62
Hôpital Albert Schweitzer 63
Honeycutt Goes Iron 64
Mrs. Lincoln Enters Bellevue Place 65
Mrs. Lincoln Winters in Nice 66
All Her Pretty Ones (Sussex, 1941) 67
Portrait of the Outlaw 68
How Peter Lorre Could Have Saved My Life 69
Trout Fishing 70
The Tobacco Queen 71

The Lame Shall Enter First (p. 2)

His favorite of seven

daughtcrs, I nursed the oíd man,

dogridden and bedtired and soon

to die. His combative lungs

wheczed as a pair of leaky

bellows. I wondered at how those eyes

talked, gesturing, restless as wrens

inside Tom Cat`s yard. I turned the

pages of the family Bible, he seldom

strayed from Esdras: so much depends on

asylum, offered in thick woods,

hollows in the tidewrack. His mind

snatched four words in the space

God had permitted for one. He

sensed the lateness of summer: the smell of mown

vetch, the fence of wet sheets,

spired by a clothespole, slapping in a burst

of breeze. And in the stillbirth of the midnight,

he dreamt, God yes, dammit he did:

burning decks at sea, howling coves

along Dolly Sods, distressing faces in mirrors.

His eyes sank, looking like chalky

taws, and I knew it wasn`t the last

breath that undid him, but all those

unnoticed which had gone before it.

Lights Over Quantico, USMC

Summer`s lazy axis I think elucidated best my

father`s psyche: getting through the brief but

hot nights, he`d slump over the airy panes, cut

his bloodshot eyes toward the hushed and distant

margins of the Corps` timber. Did he grieve alone

for his choice made to slumber in a powdery boudoir,

dreaming of a carbine and a hammock to sling against Che?

The sentry in him read the starry horizons, paused

at the roof over the Quantico garrison. In that land

leathernecks fresh back from the Mekong River concocted

an argosy of combustible rockets, pissed enough to shoot

them high up the very bowels of Heaven itself, remembering

the rainbow infernos replete with deafening swirls. For

my sake he acted like the phantasmagoric lights were

something wrong with the steamy sferics of late June

clashing with the wintry remnants of April. He called

me a fortúnate son, perhaps, for rarely were the night

lights wiínessed but by a few insomniacs. Even now after

this long night since, my father`s searching gaze will

shine in dreams. I watch the enigmatic lights and fall

silent, never singing as he did of foreign shores and halls.

Turnip Patch Kids

Black Maria chided us children to keep

off the burial plots of her relations,

lords of sleep you let be or else they

breathed on you, turning your dreams bad.

Limestones were tucked under their derbies,

rolled beneath their shoes. Evenings clouds

blew free firespit stars. Maria slipped on her nervy

red wrap, pattered quickly outback, silver

snake bracelets and belted church keys...