After Lorca, Clifton, Duras
Afar churches fill, I jump and sway, girls whisper of hand jobs, and Memphis ends:
white joy through the walls. Shuddering night trains tell us only: Memphis ends.
To come over, the bridge is the bridge between
Tennessee and Arkansas, headlights do not stop, cut through the mists
of our one season. So, they ask, you don’t believe in a future life.
I go west when Memphis ends,
where the lights are gone. At the bottom of Memphis, suspensions
and through-arcs branded on the white arms of girls, how this won’t end.
We hold tongues in our mouths, discuss manhood soft
in our fingers, foam and cry, scale cables until our fits end.
In hell we rent rooms in exchange for our virtue, find reasons to say
THIS IS THE VALUE: Memphis ends
at the bridge’s end, only a gravel way through a swamp field.
Without the lights we cannot watch. When Memphis ends,
those who cry are not heard, we know only riverboats that end, only ash
on a floodplain, only the end of water, only Arkansas. To end
a bridge that exists: find the end of heaven, its clay-thick river,
magnolia: blossom and green. Isn’t it “love without end,
amen”? Storm beginning, bridge behind me, night lies on.
Strays howl on indifferent chains, noisy tanagers flock,
see barges cannot go where Memphis ends.
