The Death of Doc Perry
Jenkins, Kentucky, July 1979
after Auden’s “Funeral Blues”
Just before the phone wires snap behind his house,
it’s a cool radio afternoon on the porch, the Reds
beating Chicago by two on a bottom-of-the-fourth
homer by Concepcion.
Two cracks widen in the leg
of an old municipal water tower up the mountain.
When the leg gives in at last to the pull of the earth,
the tower will snap the wires like that.
Ravens will
spitter off to the trees.
Inside, Virginia is playing
piano, an old hum-muffled hymn, “Christ is Risen.”
An airplane moans quiet as night toward Lonesome
Pine Airport in Wise.
Virginia ’s high voice rises
from the blue shadow. Now the fear of death is broken,
Love has won the crown.
The Old Lefty Joe Nuxhall,
his voice solid as white cotton, says to keep an eye
on this young Dominican reliever—he just might
be the next—
Prisoners of the darkness listen, the walls
are tumbling down—
then wires snap, birds spitter off
to the trees behind his house, and the old man feels
cool at first from the spray of water, then warm
with some spangly bitterroot inside him.
He tastes
hot chrome.
He recalls how just before retirement
he took Virginia, Jack, and Shirley down to Florida
to swim and fish the warm open waters of the keys.
He slowly repaints the lovely dusty throats of his
very last patients with iodine, the pretty young twins
Peggy Sue and Mary Lou Mullins.
He sends them
back toward Dunham, back toward the happiness
that is a mountain girl’s life before she must bear
what it is to be a woman.
He feels again what it is
to be a stout man with a firm grip.
He replays
those few short seasons in the Industrial League
for the Hi-Splint team of Harlan County with Earle
Combs, who died not too long ago, he’d heard, over
in Richmond.
A real shame—
Death has been conquered
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen!
He shall reign for evermore.
Doc Perry wonders, as his house crackles, the piano
gone completely now except for the buzz in his ears,
will Florida float out to sea?
Tell me, Charlie Hustle,
where have you gone?
Return to us!
Return to us!
Tell me what’s to become of the twittery little twins,
whose mother can’t afford to pay a single red penny,
whose lame-legged father was replaced at Mine 204?
But no message scribbles itself in the sky.
No doves.
And now more than ever Doc Perry wants the stars,
the moon unpacked.
He wants dirt under his feet.
Rounding third, he wants the good dry-mantled sun. |
