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.