John Estes

Chain of Custody

Where was it I first heard how form is shaped of expectation;
who was it who told me I lean too hard on my sources?
Fuck that guy; of course I remember.
I wonder sometimes how those with perfect memories function
(by which I mean invent) without blanks to fill,
without that lash of aspic dumbness, that wrung bell,
that manifold (which is to say, the manifold) act of translation
which we’ve handled as a brand of infernal physics,
a swinging in the archaic sense; imagine a gap where a hinge,
long gone missing, still manages to work. 

Unlike Rumi (hey fuck that guy too), I will tell you the secret
of the secret is to keep nothing for yourself,
and to resist being impressed by coincidences like the similarity
between the Persian words for secret and poetry.
The essence of sin, the expense of spirit, a waste of what
grants us power to bear and transmute consequences,
remains entangled with an indispensable virtue of indifference,
requiring the ongoing allowance of sunk costs.
These days the spindle of necessity is written in a code
even coders don’t comprehend with output no one can predict.
The Myth of Er turns to shit: the wheel breaks,
and the pattern of repetition that taught us justice wills out
reveals itself as one more pattern of repetition.
The trope of heaven, as an argument for irony, fails.
The only enduring mystery left to count on is why, in the shadow
of a likelihood things don’t pan out, we keep panning. 

There sits a small picture on my desk of my father’s mother,
Neva, sepia-yellow with actual age; the brass curvilinear
floral relief art nouveau frame might fetch around $25
on eBay. I don’t even know where it came from or how I got it.
It’s undated—only her name, in my dad’s neat script—
is written on the back, but she’s so young here,
in her twenties, taken sometime in the thirties, possibly
(probably) a sweetheart photo, for Carl, after whom I’m named.
Unlikely muse, unlike any version of her I knew,
not the long-haired Pentecostal holy-roller, or the quiet
housewife, or the only person to ever hit me with a switch,
in the archaic sense of hickory branch, I fetched.
Perhaps it was at her Bible Church some Sunday morning,
grandpa sucking butter rum Life Savers and napping,
dueling blue-hairs pounding out hymns on piano and organ
either side of fat Brother Simison’s carpeted stage
(or maybe in fact it was in the dank basement classroom)
I was first given over to grammars of Adam, induced,
naturally, by Enoch himself, tuned to angelic imminence
—a yoke of subtraction that can’t not end in debt—
and ruined for the slanders every scryer invites.
What is, also is not; elide (or omit) what tears up or dances:
in your career you are allowed a single tremble.
I only witnessed it once, grandma rapt within the violent
rapture of visitation, but once was enough. So far as I know
she only ever held the one kerygmatic instruction—
never preached to, never judged or cajoled us—
a truth so plain dress it deserved scant mention
(the occult knowledge she did pass on concerns red
kidney beans in chili) though so far as she knew
one we rigorously disappointed: you must speak in tongues.

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John Estes directs the MFA and Creative Writing Program at The University of Alabama and lives in Tuscaloosa. He is author of three poetry collections: Kingdom Come (C&R Press), Stop Motion Still Life (Apocryphile Press) and Sure Extinction, which won the Antivenom Award from Elixir Press. A book of short fictions, The Irrelevant Self, is forthcoming.