On the Yard

After lockdown, tier by tier undresses to sleep:

Each skull nestles in its mattress-hollow.

Wall facing wall inside of wall shrinks to a keyhole:

A fly creeps through and starts to buzz, reeling through bars

Down steel corridors. A dreamer’s eye follows the fly,

And wherever the fly lands, the eye touches down

With an airier Midas touch that turns all to glass:

The eye wakes to Bentham’s panopticon, glazed cage

Of an inspection house where only the Warden sees all.

—I am asleep and not asleep,

I stare up into faces swarming:

Cellblocks of memory focus face by face,

Mine flitting in and out of theirs: In prison issue

They come, footsteps mingling over mine in a child’s game

Of chase from yard to cell, only we’re all grown men,

Meatier, less and more malign than

A boy’s imagining himself grown...

—I was asleep and not asleep,

Faces came and went.

Frank the Joker, the West Virginia biker, who composed

“A rhyme to fit the crime”:

“There was a young fellow named Frank

Who gave his girlfriend a spank;

She fell in a heap

In front of Frank’s jeep

And old Frank ran her down for a prank.”

Or the white-haired lifer, densley oracular:

“Sometimes, after lockdown, your thoughts

Just don’t have the energy to climb the wall.”

The Giggler who bolted

His brother in a barn and burned it down,

Eyes challenging, sly:

“They killed this guy and see, I think this is funny, hilarious

In fact, but you, you won’t think so—they cut off his dick

And shoved it in his mouth.”

Or the child molester who said about flowers

At funerals: “They’re there, aren’t they,

To hide the stink off the corpse?”

Or Pat, armed robber

Who held aloof: Rolled shirtsleeves, forearms

Carved from basalt, smoke rings

Lazily effusing:

“The johns here, they got no doors:

You ever try to take a shit while someone’s watching?

It took six months to get used to that—

But here, man, the bars feed on

Time, they nibble

It to nothing.”

—I wanted to sleep and couldn’t sleep,

I stared up into faces swarming.

Three o’clock dark dissolves

The walls, faces start to drift, their atoms

Mix with concrete’s

Atomic swirl, bodies get stuck

Floating halfway through, heartbeats

Booming as through a stethoscope:

Like Michaelangelo’s slaves, if a fly

Landed on their noses,

They couldn’t lift a hand to brush it off.

Dark velleities buzz in this hive of steel

Where power handshakes

Flower in forests

Of interlocking fingers:

In red prison uniform, a man

On death row, convicted 1984, exonerated and pardoned

October 2000 (New York Times, Dec. 10):

“You could hear the humming of the chair

Every time they cut it on, like an air-conditioner

Cutting on. My daddy came to see me, he said, ‘What's that?’

I said, ‘The chair.’ The way they put it, they got to test the chair.”

—I was asleep

And couldn’t wake up.

Inside my skull, glass

Keeps shattering: Dream-beings

Unsubscribed to the will, with insect bodies

And human heads, dash against walls, mammal softness

Of cheeks and lips join with stingers

Pulsing...my eyes awake and not awake, where is the chamber

As in the horror movie Return of the Fly that, circuitry and test-tubes

Sparking, would unscramble these divided

Natures?

(They called me “Teach”

As in “Hey, Teach, how do you spell...”

When I confessed I’d been in jail, they looked disappointed in me:

Their side of the wall was theirs, not mine.)

—I tried to turn over, to look away,

But couldn’t wake up, couldn’t not wake.

Chemicals drip into a man’s veins, one each

For heart, lungs, brain.

Strapped to a table, he stares

Impassive, eyes flickering shut, body

A meat wall, IV tubes

Almost empty...

—I was asleep and not asleep,

I couldn’t move to wake.

I hear shrill wings—that fly inspecting bread crumbs

Under dining hall tables while the Warden blares

Descartes over the Intercom:

“If a man’s head were lopped off

His mouth would keep on moving, faultlessly

Justifying his crimes.”

But that fly, that speck against

Steel, its wings steered in ways that seem crazy

To eyes awake, not awake,

Not seeing, all-seeing, the head unmoving

Moving to turn away...oh seely fly

I can’t not see, can’t move to brush away

From my unsleeping eyes, you veer

In spirals unflattened into pathos

Of careening chaos, your eccentric

Flight path darts

Through bars, oh alas, hairy

Vibrant fly!

Source: Far Side of the Earth (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003)