OKLAHOMA CITY
1963

Eight times a day for six months they flew that damn
                        F-104 low over Oklahoma City
Testing the human factor
The public reaction to sonic booms
        I placed my palm flat against the window
        it arced
        electric
        like the sudden gathering of air before a twister

Baby cryin' and cryin' I like to
pull my HAIR out

        The FAA called those who complained a
                bunch of neurotics

                
We had a bamboo patch a
pecan tree.
We had an oilfield in our backyard
(yard that spilled over the horizon)
It wasn't 
ours but
that's where our house was

A girl resembling her father.
One with her great-grandmother's hair.
A boy with his mother's eyes.

They had these faces. We've saved part of them as we've grown
Right-angled to the plains

Daddy went ahead looking for work
We followed  
Glass wrapped in newspapers
Dragging our schoolbags behind like
ships in search of a Silk Route

Sometimes not a
Storm coming
Ju----st night.
The sunsets green and orange and black
illuminating the
clouds of Marie
The sun flattening like a penny on the tracks
Wind coarse as sand against newsprint



Mother washed our hair in the 
outdoor sink with bar soap

The natural flouride in the water turned 
our teeth hard
Our voices lost the
ocean, the gravel of the
Bronx -
even before speech took hold 
our throats went west

                                       
        They had these faces
        Darkening like cloth under water
        Deep-rutted
        bone tattoos staring out the
        picture window
        As far as the eye could see the land stretched out its
        Used beauty
        The land like great-grandma's breasts

We lived here
coming in '55 Seven
and the dog, Flower, stuffed into a Simca coupe my father thought exotic
driving straight into the barrel of the
gun Oklahoma

        Because my father was a traveling salesman I believe all
        men are imaginary, translucent as the cicada skeleton

The dog, Flower, slept in the cellar with an alarm clock wrapped in a 
towel
To remind her of her mother's heart
When the rains came we
put on our bathing suits and danced in it
We danced on land stolen from the Choctaw and Cherokee by men crookeder than a
barrel of snakes

Sister Hazel lived next door 
                (She said
                        Somebody fired  
                        a gun Opened up the land)               
She sat at the kitchen table soaking her 
ruby tooth in salt water
to remove any leftover ghosts from the stone. 
She said: You have to keep doing it

In Sister Hazel the bodies of women do not die
                Unstable
        Spontaneous
                skull egg atom
Her body (closer and
smaller with age)
folds like Roman shades below the shoulders
                        above the knees;
gathers and concentrates the
whole of her life
compressed, shining, stubborn

I left the green world behind and entered.
It's an accident where you are born.
I wrote my name in the dust with a stick.
It said OK.

This was after the panthers disappeared from the foothills between Fayetteville and
Tallequah

        :When he 
        drove 
        he dreamed
(He took a long time returning
He went to live with a quiet woman in a 
farmhouse outside Tokyo)

The cumulus herds of buffalo
                        roamed the skies
I sat on the broad blue porch each day
biting my nails
staring across the flat tongue of the plains
Derricks rose gold and rust in the sun like calm distant giraffes

                Some
                say we are born slowly and
                without miracles

        :He says he would never write about it
        Writing isn't the road
(The morning he awoke in Japan the
band still in its tux
He let Ellington borrow his bathrobe)           

Anything perpendicular to the country was subject to chaos and loss
Granpa came from the east to say Jezebel and Scarlett O'Hara of Londonderry were
dead and buried
The blue hydrangea turned red when old like blood exposed to the air
The moon hung low as my mother's fallen uterus
The Seminoles danced under the big tent outside Tulsa
2 shows at 3 and 5



Sister Hazel won every game of Solitaire. She licked her finger turning the cards as if
she was reading a book. 
Didn't walk around. Mother'd call from the porch she braced 
both hands on the cyclone fence catapulted over. 
 
She was born in Lily Bud. 
She danced in New Orleans on her
Honeymoon. 

        The radiant sky The wind carrying Nevada
        The wind Marie called radioactive
                Ra as Egyptian as sun
        doubling and tripling and quadrupling

                Rain we danced in
                Wind we let through our hair

Mestengo!
        We were the
        ownerless beasts

and when we were good Daddy took out the
magnifying glass
It was a miniature
The kind printers use to check impression

In the sun he set paper on fire
We put everything in the world
under it
and watched as it enlarged

I saved part of that as I grew
Each time it was the act of
stones swept clean

We watched for a mountain from the kitchen window
Mirage like heat turning to water
up ahead where the road dipped and rose

We watched for the sound of the car
                in that great traditional
                absent pa, crazy ma of America

We were beautiful gathering pecans after the twister uprooted the
lilac
Scattered its small flowers like snow in a snowless place       

Wild as mustangs
        Fearful of Flower after TV showed what a dog will do
        depending on who holds the leash
        Disdainful of god; his offer of sanctuary after Mother showed
        us the charred remains of a catholic church the KKK burned to the
        ground in 1924
        Believing in nothing, not even the air which ate us cell by cell

The small towns of prairie dogs were threatened, and so my
instinct like theirs is to
eat standing up at the very door of my house
My eyes shifting constantly

Gas was cheap.
Sister Hazel collected promotional gifts from the service stations
A set of tall frosted tumblers with the Five Tribes and Hop-a-long Cassidy
etched in color
The Funk & Wagnall Encyclopedia, 2 volumes per tank
When we got to T, she said: Look up Tulsa
                        Its area in square miles, its principal exports.

34 years ago her sons were 
out back
planting Giant Timber Bamboo as a windbreak a way to
hold on to water
She was inside giving birth to a change-of-life-child

The twister took the roof off her
swallowed the boys
Her daughter is named after that

Marie!
Your mother's knuckles are loose and
blue as the eye of her womb
Her bony spine pokes through her housedress like
Abacus
calculating years in pestilence and migration:
        Black flies in Maine
        Chiggers in Arkansas
        Children of God in Texas

I had this face
It was made in Korea
on leave
It hid in the bamboo when the wind
Fierce as Mother
                ransacked the oilfields
And grew
Someone living
Walking here

on eggshells those tiny white blood cells the doctor said were
eating my baby sister from the inside out
                : O Marie you speak like Coyote: 
        WHEN I come ---
        All the spirits of the dead will be with me.
        There will be no more other-side-camp.
        Then,
        Things will be made right...                                 



When we went to town we drove
But there were HORSES
                from Puerto Rico!
tethered to the parking meters.    

This was after the gates of Hiroshima splintered the blue bridge of Goya, the
landscapes of Sesshu.
There were private and public tragedies. There was no space betwe----en them.