Adam Vines

My Father’s Trowel

It was a magic wand, baton, from which

Retaining walls and symphonies appeared—

But only in his hand, the one I feared—

Prosthesis shearing clangs and twangs, the pitch

Of labor. With the “fucks,” the flicks of mud

I mixed too thin, the tamps of bricks and rasps

Of joints, the courses rose, despite my lapses

Back to a time before when the word was “crud,”

And curse words he would hide from me were kept

In stow behind closed doors with Mom. He wore

A tie back then and ran his routes, collecting

Premiums, “beneficiary” the word he swore.

But I can’t see that man, that truth, except

Right now, his trowel in my hand, its anger tolling.

Coursing the Joints

While setting trots and drops for channel cats

on the river where my family spawned, I sculled

the bank, around the bend and past the camps

where city folks launched boats with colors culled

from candy stores and tourist traps, “The Lulled,”

my gramps would say in his last years when wakes

from outboards nearly swamped his Jon and bulled

him to the bank. I pulled into the slough

where he would mash his shine and take a nip or five and lose

himself in jars. The cabin that he built

five decades back from rock he’d hauled and sand

he’d scrapped from roads, the mortar pink from clay,

was torched. Some hunters I ran off the month before

were running dogs for deer and said, “the land

ain’t yours.” I walked them to the boundary line,

a pistol at their backs. “We’ll get you, pussy boy,”

they said. Some empty Bud cans had been tossed

beside a white oak where we nailed and skinned our cats.

The cabin was now just a shell, a porch

of river rocks, a couple walls of shale,

the chimney still intact. Inside, a scorched

bed frame, a deformed stove and fridge. The rails

that held a whittled pistol grip to our hailed

.410—named “Gar Be Gone”—laid on the hearth

beside the lock and barrel. The rest was veiled

with ash and char, but I could see the mortar lips

the inside walls once concealed, where he had jooged with fingertips

and squished the mud between the upturned rocks

where trowels just couldn’t fit or when he tipped

the shine while mixing mud and laying rock.

I pressed my knuckles into his, my thumb,

my palm, and bent a brick tie back and forth

until it snapped. I ran my hands across the joints,

from course to course, my fingers spreading out

and snaking through his hands: the fossils he

had left behind, the gift the fire gave back to me.

The Silent Stones

The Watson’s pond, hard freeze—which in

the Black or Bible Belt was rare as sin,

or without God, or so our Baptist preacher ruled

we should believe. My friend and I were skipping school,

ice fishing Bama-Style in store. We tossed

a brick that did not make a dent and slid

across the ice like an unanswered prayer. We flossed

some fishing line through another’s cores. It did

not make a dent and broke the line and slid

into the other brick as if it were a curling stone.

“Olympics!” Scott exclaimed and grabbed a stick

shaped like a backward shepherd’s crook and honed

the handle slick, removing all the bark.

I grabbed up all of Preacher Watson’s bricks,

a handful at a time, and lugged them to the bank.

We slid our stones until we had our fix:

a hundred bricks or so we spread across

the ice, coal barges that had lost their tugs

or iced-in ships. Then we practiced casts with plugs

we rarely pitched for fear of losing them to snot moss.

The bricks became the spawning bass I sought.

I skated by my Zara Spook, and Scott

tied on his Hellbender and took a shot

with a long cast and snagged a stranded yacht

and pulled it in, the drag locked down, retrieve

as steady, measured as a pro until

the frayed line snapped, the lure’s bill—the magic of its lilt

and shake—an iceberg jutting up.

                                                                          The notes we deceived

our teacher with, our mamas’ signatures

we looped in prideful Os and Ps, didn’t hide

our curling. After everyone, it seemed, had tanned our hides,

the bricks had sunk, and we had pitched enough manure

and prayed in vain for all those bricks to rise,

spring brought us back to that damned muddy sty.

The Hellbender had floated to the bank, our lie

with treble hooks fixed fast to grass like a combine’s

tines. We waded out beyond the spawning beds

and dove for bricks while Preacher Watson presided

over us, chastened us beneath his breath while we wed

our giggles to a haggard twang each time we laid

a brick upon the shore. The pollen worms

from oaks were dropping everywhere. A yellow sheen

consumed our wakes when we swam back and forth,

but under water we discovered in the stones

and buried in the muck a silence we

had never felt in church or school, a silence sin

reserved for those like Judas, his silver coins

now still, like lures suspended on a frozen pond.

Memory Care

She can’t remember red, though red is what

she wears, or elements: the wind outside,

the rain last week. She will (or won’t) abide

the host this month, his dead-fish hand and cut

of cheek when he asks if she’ll pray with him.

The yeses, nos have lost their way, and she

just nods at everything, her face a whim

her fancy never bears. She would have seethed

at people she now hears and doesn’t hear:

“That pudding looks so good. You must be cold.”

The preacher whispers in her ear a fold

of sounds, “take, eat—this is my body here,

given for you. This is my blood, which is

poured out for you. Now, drink.” She will not part

her lips. The preacher becomes her husband: “this,

my body, this, my blood.” He hits her mark.

She fingers her chest—its steady ramp—the thrum

of florescent lights and says, “my body, you,

my blood, the covenant we made anew,

my blood, my body. Remember us, our son?”