Eric Smith

The Mercy Dancers

I.M. MICHAEL SHANE SMITH

How could I tell you that I listened to your last breath enter
the room, that it banged the shutters of illness that left you

drenched in a rented bed in a paper gown. I was two rooms
and as many decades away. I was trying to find a memory

with a bit of sun in it. Maybe one with your window down, 
palm hammering out the songs of summer you saw recede

in the rearview. How could I tell you that the moon splintered 
into nine choirs as your mother unlaced the knot of her hands 

from the bedrail? In leaving, she left you room enough to leave 
the ruin of your body. You had spared her this departure, 

which for both of you, though it’s difficult to say so, was a mercy. 

*

mercy of frost     rummaging the pockets      of bruise-blue firs
mercy of wind     whistling in black sockets      of the antlered dead
mercy the steps of a man who wasn’t winter     but knew its name

mercy for everyone who humbles themselves     before loss      
mercy only mercy for the moments    
we forever inter     in these inadequate graves

*

Headlights lanced the wen of silence embedded in the night. 
We leaned against the peeling slats of your porch, drinking beer

and watching stars unravel above Cashtown. Around us, the air 
was a green dance of fireflies. The black insistence of the crickets 

accompanied them. As I left that night, a shadow shadowing 
the pines between us, you shouted something, but my memory 

is large enough to admit only the shape of your voice, 
not what it held. I wish now for the small mercy 

that would allow me to open the envelope of night, 
to reveal what it was you had written 

on the last hour of the last time I saw you. 

*

mercy of the maple in october abscission      
mercy of her singer      asleep beneath its cowl
mercy of the last cough   of butane     in a cheap lighter

mercy for the steadiness    it offers the hand     of the smoker
mercy of the dew     lingering    in a hoofprint
in the family plot off corinth road mercy for the lilies

lined up on her hearth the pale ellipse of their petals

*

Call them the mercy dancers, those moments of hesitation
in which some part of us performs, unasked, an act of attrition. 

Call them the answer, riddling the dark, beyond the baffling 
enterprise of human being. Call them the arcs we draw between 

the stars to clarify, if only for a moment, the celestial narrative 
of which we are but a glimmer. Call them what braces 

for the hurricane of a loved one’s anger when the winds are behind it. 
They are the spiral of the samara out of the maple’s longing grasp. 

They are the bore of the .22 you taught us to fire, the mercy
we smell still in the rill of its blue smoke. Call them that in us 

which christens the seized chambers in the heart of a Ford tractor. 
Call them that which oils our own secret machinery, the quick

patter of rain’s eighth notes, the run-down heels that kick up 
sawdust at every dance you whirled through like the sun,  

the dim lamps hung in the rafters of every unstarred night, 
the lines the crow follows across the stubble-strewn fields. 

Call them that which unburdens the body of its breathing, 
that shut the doors of the skull, invoking such stillness in us. 

Salvation is that in us which lacks grammar. But not music. 
We stand in its impoverished light, calling down names

that hum in us like the rabbit’s heart, unseamed by what haunts it. 

*

mercy for the suicide    whose arteries when opened to air
unleashed a storm     of crows    that devoured the quiet
mercy which left him      cloaked in black feathers

mercy that spared his mother     the slack rubble     of his body     
mercy that left his heart to sing to her    
as a child does   with such hunger 

mercy of the termites     and the doomed tongues     
they spell in the walls    of empty houses     
mercy for the carnivorous dark       which sanctifies 

erosion      mercy for the riverbank’s mud     and the lapse 
of dapple in its waters      mercy another name      
for history     that sad anthology of frictions

*

In what key, in what sanctuary, could your voice accompany the quiet
of those who listen by holding their breath? When we stood before you,

the emptiness said everything to us. The preacher inventoried
your sins with a Pentecostal fire, and explained that he had burned up

those roads with you, carrying a can of kerosene. All that remained 
to be said was said when night lit its black lamps above the heads 

of the grieving. Your daughters never left your side. I saw them 
young again, running to you through the rain, mirth tracing

their freckles, saying everything that was unsayable except by skin. 

*

mercy for your mother’s hands      gowned in flour     
mercy for the angels that danced    when she clapped 
on each milled grain     mercy for all of us      giggling beneath    

the soft descent of her hand-made snow     mercy for the marrow     
you had them harvest from your bones     to save your sister     
the loss you were learning the name of  even before     

it began to climb    the white rungs of your spine

*

You would say to me that all of this is a mercy. One I have 
known this entire time, even if only in the hand’s small tremors. 

One that bends and straightens over the field that, until now, 
I left unblemished. It is here, on the last page in the book 

that remains half-written, that I step down the barbed wire, 
and enter the sun-struck pasture, snow and light surrendering 

to my steps. And here you are, where you’ve always been,
where every sentence, even this one, ends with mercy.

 

Eric Smith’s work appears recently in The New Criterion and Southwest Review. He is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

 
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