Poteat, Joshua

United States, (b. 1971)

Illustrating the machine that makes the world
— after Alice Aycock

An uneasy fog swells from this calligraphy,
the bloom of recollection decoyed to decay.
Or is it just the morning, breathing after the dull rain,
cast over the moss banks and downriver
where the reservoir molders its walls. I can’t decide.
I’m in no position to do so. A woman long ago told me
a pig’s heart was so similar in heft and cell to a man’s
that she considered finding a pig husband.
A pig pulled her from a bog once, as a child,
so this made sense for her. Slaughter, she said,
and only then will you begin to live with the blood,
with the bone of ghost and of lineage.
She was a woman I could not love, so I threw her crinoline
into the laceweed and got out of there. I was not a pig.
I could see a harem of clothespins trembling in her breast pocket.
That is how I will remember her.
The fog, remote in our days of tippets and polonaise,
bearskinned its body to ours, sodden, believable,
a true friend. It had always remained close, dowsing
in the drowned valley, clairvoyant far upon the bay.
Either way, the fog still knows its music, double-handed
aubade through the birches, aquarelle on the frost,
soft, broken chords, horsehair and sheepgut. Later in my life
I knew a pig who sang to the moon,
and to the night and water. Crowds came from their burned
cities to hear the pig, and fed it rotten apples because
that was all it desired. I realize now that it wasn’t singing.
It already had a blanket, and some hay to nest in.
It didn’t need to sing. I wish it did. I would have given it anything.
I wanted it to sing something truthful, something full
of life, like Why are you so slow to punish the wicked or
Harden your hearts, there is God coming.
A father in the crowd whispered to his child, You won’t remember
this, will you? Or was it me whispering to myself,
to the child who lived inside my mouth?
Because I am old, I now give you the last word.
Always keep the brightest for last.

The Stigmata Rather than a Punch on the Nose

If you’d asked my father when he was nine
why he beat up a kid for calling him Little Bo Peep
he would have beat you up too. Not because
you would ask in that superior way you always do
but because he couldn’t understand the difference
between hate and pain and for that he’d sock you one.
It had nothing to do with being a bonnet-headed
shepherdess forever afraid of wolves or communists
hiding in the chicken-coop, forever coming home
empty-handed. It was the destruction
of the one word he knew better
than any other that got to him.
Imagine: 1952, summer, an over-ripe pear
in each pocket, furiously defending his name
and his nose and no sheep in sight
down the sweet-leaf rows, no relief
for the wretched in Maysville, N.C.
He tried to picture himself leaving town
on the sorrel’s dewed back, early morning,
the long-throated birds asleep in the sourgrass
and the sorrel wading into the horizon,
but all he could think of was a wonderful scene
in a movie and as always would become a spectator
of his own life. You would have thought
that the other boys (Marion and Steamboat and the rest),
shirt-tails open in the wind, would let up,
forget about it. They kept coming,
waiting for him on the back road beneath the willows.
Their fascination with seeing blood pour from a nose,
even their own, became not just blood
but the reconstruction of it.
Not love, but the forgetting:
a yellowed calm breaking over the leaves
and their faces as dusk did then.
This was not dusk or locust though.
It was the yellow that memory
brings to a place, carrying a kerosene lantern
lit for a boy stuck on the roof
of a grain silo, too afraid to climb down in the dark.
The yellow my father saw in his fists
as he would light up one boy after another
like a cupped match, making whoever it was pay
for the blood of his good name.
Little Bo Peep. Poteat.
It was a simple mistake to make,
but what does reason have to do with instinct,
with a stain on a boy’s palm, the sow in her trough
bleeding out of her eyes for want of darkness
or rather a light luminous enough to see
the pear trees at the rim of the meadow
one last time? The sick sow he fed mornings,
combing the lice from her brow,
speaking his own name as a question to her. Poteat?
Our ruins follow us, that much he told me,
later, after our good-byes and our kind sirs
quickened in the clay, red at the heart of it,
the deepest well of it, the sow that rubbed
her ears raw on a fence post, long gone by then.
Calm yourself. Give in.
And that is where you find him, in the fields,
a muslin of rain delivering the ancient scent
of tobacco. Where else would he be?
Born in a field at the edge of a ditch he would tell her.
This is a story without surprises.
The formality of a swallow’s nest falling
from the ruined rafters of a silo didn’t confuse
or sadden him, he just didn’t want it anymore:
the dying becoming dead, and the dear old summer
washed up on the river’s bank,
dear sweet summer.
The stupid pig lying there. Fuck you. Fuck you.
You don’t know him at all.

The Angels Continue Turning the Wheels of the Universe Despite Their Ugly Souls (Malvern Hill Battleground)
— after Alice Aycock

There is truth in the phrase, the dead are at ease under the fields.
Autumn is what seizes it. A field of dried cotton stalks
have a grace in the wind only the dead can love,
and so, belief comes simple, rendering not a season
but stalk against stalk,
poor cousin-song of crickets,
poor furrow-in-the-gut, little nothing-at-all.
At least it will snow soon goes the cotton’s rattled melody,
and this field beyond the city, flooded by night,
turns blue in the first frost as the ghosts of past crops
bridle upon it.
I give the field ghosts, and the wind eggs them on —
corn and sweet potato, tobacco and bean —
hovering the mule-plough of two hundred years.
So much for truth.
It’s the least I can do since I cannot for the life of me
think of anything but the thin curtains of a hospital room
and an X-ray of my crooked spine pinned to a wall of light,
the sweet milk of vertebrae, my own skull
frowning back at me, such a cold cup of jaw,
so white I could have easily drank myself.
What a desire, to take one’s self in, to unravel
the body’s red yarn shapes and deceive the plague
of boundless hunger, to imagine this cotton field as bone
ready for the gin, rib and wrist and collar,
all tenderhearted stars,
inexact, held up to the light of no moon, no cloud.
This is me scattered in the furrows, I thought.
This is me, marrowless and fluff, grub-eaten.
I don’t believe in much. Not the descent and re-ascent
of the soul… the palace of the kingdom of the dead…
So much for desire.
I have seen those X-rays of Velasquez, the hidden layers
illuminated to reveal six ghost-versions of hands along the rim
of an egg bowl, six different plates of fish and garlic,
a dwarf’s blind face formed into the severed head of a pig,
then back to a dwarf, leaving the pig’s wondrous eyes.
A bird later becomes a peach in the mouth of a jug,
and this is how I feel about the world at the moment.
Troppo vero, said Pope Innocent in a letter
to Velasquez of his portraits. Too faithful.
Representation is all we are in the end, I guess, and then some.
Charred ivory: muller stone: horse-hair:
white lead: madder: massicot.
This is me.
It is almost winter, here in the leftover cotton
that once held the thousand luminous angels of desire
as they curled inward towards a truth
unlike any flame they had seen.
This must be how the soldiers slept,
with the night all around them
and their bodies knowing where it was.
And this must be how the deer moved
over the fields long after the battle, drinking frost
from the eyes of the dead with their small pink tongues.
Oh dwarf, oh king, oh skeleton of mine,
will I ever feel your wings between my hands again?

About the Poet:

Joshua Poteat, United States, (b. 1971) is a poet, editor and assemblage artist. Poteat has published three books of poems, Ornithologies (2006) and Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World (2009) and The Regret Histories: Poems (2015), as well as a chapbook, Meditations (2004).

He has won prizes and fellowships from bodies including The Literary Review, Bellingham Review, The Millay Colony, Virginia Commission for the Arts and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He was named the 2011-2012 Donaldson Writer in Residence at The College of William & Mary.

Poteat lives in Richmond, VA where he is an editor at the Martin Agency and also edits assorted texts including art history monographs, junk mail, and TV/radio scripts. Poteat makes lightboxes and ink transfers out of found materials and collaborates with the designer Roberto Ventura on art installations. [DES-12/19]

Illustrating the machine that makes the world— after Alice Aycock

The Stigmata Rather than a Punch on the Nose

The Angels Continue Turning the Wheels of the Universe Despite Their Ugly Souls (Malvern Hill Battleground)— after Alice Aycock

About the Poet:

Illustrating the machine that makes the world
— after Alice Aycock

The Angels Continue Turning the Wheels of the Universe Despite Their Ugly Souls (Malvern Hill Battleground)
— after Alice Aycock