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World Tree

By DAVID WOJAHN

University of Pittsburgh Press

Copyright © 2011 David Wojahn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8229-6142-0

Contents

Scribal: My Mother in the Voting Booth......................................................3August, 1953................................................................................5Screensaver: Pharaoh........................................................................6Ending with a Quotation from Walden.........................................................9Nazim.......................................................................................11Christ at Emmaus............................................................................14For the Honorable Wayne LaPierre, President, National Rifle Association.....................17Self-Portrait Photo of Rimbaud with Folded Arms: Abyssinia, 1883............................19Rolltop.....................................................................................20Napping on My Fifty-Third Birthday..........................................................22Quicken.....................................................................................25Fetish Value................................................................................26For Tomas Tranströmer..................................................................29Another Epistle to Frank O'Hara.............................................................33Self-Portrait as Sock Puppet................................................................36Ode to Black 6..............................................................................37Mixtape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab.......................................................39Jimmie Rodgers's Last Blue Yodel, 1933......................................................41For Willy DeVille...........................................................................42The Apotheosis of Charlie Feathers..........................................................44World Tree..................................................................................46Ochre.......................................................................................55Mudlark Shuffle.............................................................................107Freshwater Bay..............................................................................109Letter to Eadweard Muybridge................................................................111In the Domed Stadium........................................................................113Nocturne: Newark Airport....................................................................115A Decorated Ghost Dance Shirt...............................................................118Visiting Dugan..............................................................................119Web Prayer for Milosz.......................................................................121Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash...................................................................122Block Letters...............................................................................123Sepulchre...................................................................................124Talismanic..................................................................................128Notes.......................................................................................131Acknowledgments.............................................................................134

Chapter One

    Scribal: My Mother in the Voting Booth

    Stabbing the hole by Nixon's name, with a stylus on a chain,
        like some scribe
    in Lagash piercing wet clay slabs for the palace records. The count
        for the priest king's
    chariots & Amorite slaves must be exact. All day her adding machine
        has purred, the shavings

    litter the floor. Stylus through Nixon, stylus through Agnew. Two hours
        she's waited in the wet
    November snow of Minnesota & her cold next week will worsen
        to pneumonia. Over
    the churning columns she'll cough & pass out & waken in County General,
        shrouded in an oxygen tent

    where she cannot smoke. The count must be exact—14 lyres with
        the heads of bearded bulls,
    130 votives, 6 figurines of Marduk fashioned of hammered gold.
        The water glass is trembling.
    Beside her bed I hover, the clear walls of the tent breathe in & out.
        Flicker of Cronkite,

    of Nixon on the wall in black & white. He has a secret plan
        to end the war.
    She sleeps. The tent draws a breath & the joint I smoked
        in the parking lot turns the light
    a jack-o'-lantern orange. I tell myself in my teenage hubris
        that I will not work on

    Maggie's Farm like her. Ain't gonna work like her
        to blindly serve.
    But how her white ectoplasmic face looms back at me this morning
        (breathe in, breathe out,
    the tent's rise & fall) in the waiting room of Richmond Pediatrics.
        All night Luke's coughed,

    meaning the pneumonia's returned & the office radio oozes hate,
        talk show & its porcine
    fascist droning on. He has a secret plan to replace the Constitution
        with gelignite.
    Over us all it washes, the fine volcanic dust, over the fevered
        toddlers of the suburbs

    & their mothers in sensible shoes, over the Parentings
        & Mademoiselles
    & the parking lot minivans, the toxic "W"s affixed to their bumpers.
        Breathe in & serve
    breathe in & serve. A slab of plastic for the co-pay,
        the computer station hums.

    Cylinder seal & tapestry, ninety geldings in the palace stables. Nebulizer
        spewing Pulmicort.
    Pink amoxicillin, doctored to taste like bubblegum. seven double-headed
        battleaxes, burnished bronze
    now oxidized the color of pond scum. Blindly, blindly do we serve.
        O Priest King, Dear...