After my grandfather’s death, my mother mailed me a pack of random photographs she found on his desk. The poems collected here refer to those photos, with each photo representing a tarot card and my attempts to make sense of his life and to reconcile our vastly different spiritual expressions. Poems may be taken together as a full poem cycle, or individually.
N.
I read your photographs
Like tarot cards,
Scrying as much as prying –
Evidence-based speculation –
An interrogation
Into your past.
I.
There’s something about driving / it’s a blood thing / in you or not / joy of the road well-worn or a tired heavy foot slogging across America / how many miles did you log / how many bald and tread-less tires did you wear out / how far did you go to only come back to your home.
Sometimes the Chariot of your truck appears like a ghost I once saw while driving.
II.
A kind of Kerouac or Cassidy / possessed by the spirit of the road / or maybe, equally, old age / the guilt of never having been where you should have been.
I cannot know.
But, even retired you couldn’t resist the urge to drive / and took me out with you some nights / the imaginary sight seeing of darkness / you and I / the Two of Headlights.
III.
There is a ritual to assigning meaning / a system for symbolism / both involve the repetition of drawing tire-marked sigils on maps / tracing and retracing steps / coordinates / compasses / legends / longitude / latitude.
Memory made palpable through driving directions.
A literal “memory lane” / and you have used your psychographic sense of direction to drag ley lines across the country and back.
What magic books you’ve written in your tracks / your personal spreads for reading cards / the runes / the angelic language of your movement.
IV.
I know why you were here / outside the old white house / you were here to remember / this picture / you taking it / appearing like a Six of Cups.
Your eyes outside what used to be Old-Man-So-N-So’s house, then turned into a tattoo shop / your stories must be different than mine:
“The old man used to trade me pennies for a pound of tin cans.”
“My father bought moonshine here, and then when I was old enough to drive myself, I did the same, with my tin can money and my shame.”
But for me, a picture of the old white house where I’d hang out at sixteen and seventeen / lying about my age so that I could sit in the lobby and talk and look at tattoo magazines / until at eighteen / when I got my nipples pierced there.
Then a year later it was a jumble of rubble / boards and nails and bent sheets of a rusted tin roof / and a year later, again, it is an empty lot / replanted with grass.
The Tower has fallen / what wands will grow up through the dirt of that hole / ten years later and nothing still.
V.
A picture of city hall / the Five of Cups / I know why you came here / again to remember.
What was it / lost youth / regrets / bar fight and speeding tickets / the times in your wild adolescence when they hauled you in / drunk with Roger?
I’m making things up / things you can’t defend or refute / things you can’t correct / moments lost to the silence of Death / you drew that card too / maybe / and more likely / you were there with your camera / remembering when you were a child and your daddy had business to attend to / or simply there to note the change as I am wont to do.
VI.
It was the fifties / you were alive / but not present in Paris / cafes / late nights / a history of philosophical caffeinated conversations / energetic wandering / drifting / drifting / drifting.
A rejection of Euclidean ideas / architecture without purpose / a utopia of directionless wandering / you, thousands of miles away / equally caught in this zeitgeist / traveled with Dadaist cut up maps.
Caught between red clay and red cliffs / a serpent of psychogeography / great driver of night / who was beat without knowing what it meant to be beat / “who barreled down the highways of the past” / you Denver hero / young and hip in a Paris of your own / a silent philosopher I am still getting to know.
VII.
I know what you were doing here / drifting / letting roads lead you / letting memory map you.
Dada cartographer / I know you were fearful of the absurd / disturbed by it / you fought it / you filled it with stories / little narratives justifying nothing / anything to fight the emptiness.
You drifted through your stomping grounds / your subconscious driving / your camera taking notes / maybe I’ve made you my metaphor:
The Page of Cameras.
The Knight of Stories.
VIII.
Whose cards am I reading / yours or mine / because I’m concerned about this Ten of Cups / inverted / in opposition to what we say about the dead / never speak ill of them / and you’re one of them / but your home is broken.
Call the cards or me a liar / I don’t mind accusations from the grave / especially when I know what brought you here / to this church / this humble Baptist cathedral of wood and vinyl siding swimming in an asphalt parking lot.
Was God knocking on the door of your heart / did the bubbles of your past reach the surface and pop / or were you simply taking note of the space and how it changed / were you awash in the same sea of nonlinear anarchy as me / is that what brought you to your knees / were you praying / begging / were you asking god for second chances?
I only know that you were here / looking through your lens / wandering / drifting / and that when I turn your photos over / the King of Cups appears / again inverted.
I wonder who you were before I was born / who you were / not when you wandered / but when you roamed / but maybe there’s something in me / something that floats to the top only through a layer of you.
IX.
All of the human condition / crammed into seventy-eight cards / were you the Page or the Grand Patriarch / what face were you in the Major Arcana / maybe you were none / even magic has its limits / like a map has its borders.
“Beware: here there be monsters”
Something is always outside / which makes me wonder / with an answer in mind / why in your tiny deck of cards / only, maybe, one roll of film / twenty-four or twenty-seven / you have so many churches / were you too on the outside / your heart roaming / terra incognita / searching for a home?
I’d say, you have a suit of Steeples / a suit of roof pitches at all degrees / maybe others too / but half of you keeps me flipping over cards?
Where is salvation / not in the suit of Swords / where is peace / where is heaven / not in the Wands or Pentacles / let me triangulate / double check our coordinates and make a plan to navigate / or maybe / I’ll turn over another card.
X.
The Chariot card / your old black truck / it brought you to this crumbling house / outside these weathered walls / the ivy and the kudzu / vines that hide the history / cover the trails / obscure the route that brought you here / here in time / here along the forking path / here in the garden of memory / a personal library / a turret on the Tower of Babel.
You were led here like the wise men / a star guiding you in the night / but really you wandered through the silent desert.
Asleep / awake / asleep / and found your way here.
XI.
The Chariot again / just the corner / the bed of your truck / a barn in decay / memories of when my childhood sat in the sleeper / when you drove us cousins down the road and back up / and it wasn’t even my birthday.
But here / this card / as much a symbol of transportation as unyielding steady lack of change / note the symbolism / the road / the fence / the caved in chicken houses / the umbrage of trees / the grass / I call this card “Confusion” / I call this card “Separation” and “Collision.”
I call this card “Lack.”
XII.
What card in the Major Arcana is great artist?
Do I have to read The Magician as such?
Does he paint what he creates / or does he create it?
What card is memory?
What card is cancer?
XIII.
Every detail in a card contributes to the meaning / subtly / the Two of Power-Lines / electricity / a current flowing / invisible magic smoke / back and forth between something / nothing / communication between your eye and heart.
Tthis card is equally the Three of Weeds / growing in the foreground / what more symbolism could we need / the modern intrudes on the rural / the pastoral caves to new paved highways / and your eye.
The Ace of Cameras captures the collapse of the crumbling ceiling / I know what you were doing here / I know what you were seeing.
XIV.
The Three of Power-Lines / this time / stripes across your card / parallel the Ace of Guardrails / so much interrupted by the eruption of trees / vertical and horizontal meet / and there / framed by intersections / the lines / the objects of your eye:
You came here / wandered in your old black truck / to catch this barn on film / weathered and rough / less about memory and more about study / an attempt to see the composition crafted by your creator.
Looking out to learned how lines converge.
XV.
I count nine limbs on the tree / the Nine of Pentacles / your cancer was chestnut growing in your guts / but fruiting first in your mind then eye.
It traveled to your hand / a meandering journey like your driving.
You came here / you made this card / to draw / not to remember / but to study and recreate / a body in your morgue / a reference to reference / lines to outline / something to make with charcoal and pencils on white printer paper / another suit in this deck of cards.
XVI.
Let’s say / I hold this photo / this card / the Three of Graves / the Ace of Steeples / and I see your memories / I see your vision / what you wanted to create / what you couldn’t help but remember / through your dead-man’s eyes I see your hands moving / charcoal and graphite / lines layered on paper / my eyes through your eyes / my hand through your hand…
What are we drawing together / what history is coded in your lines / I hold, still, the card / photo-tarot / and in the scratching of our pencil against the paper or hear the hymn / we shade in for a shadow / and there is the laughter and rumble of post-preaching chatter.
We draw the door to remember walking through it / we draw the bricks to remember what was inside of them / you’d been away so long you needed to / you need to nail your story in place.
I’m holding this photo / let’s say / I’m laying down the tarot / I’m remembering it for you / with you / and making up the rest.
XVII.
The story of this barn / let’s say / you helped the owner sixty years ago / lead his horses into the stable / let’s say his name is Mister Teague / or Old Man Sanford / or Ledford Chastain…
And he payed you in quarters / but you did it to help him / or maybe your father was punishing you / after coming in late and sloppy on moonshine…
But now / in the present of poetry / of reading my mind through your cards / my cards / our shared subconscious / there you are again / we are again / your hand / our hand / your eyes / our eyes…
We are drawing this place in its full decay / the rusted tin roof / the weathered siding / we measure what it was before / when you were younger / when I wasn’t holding the Barn.
XVIII.
This house is finally gone / so are you / buried within a mile of the mess left when they tore it down / I never asked you but I imagine you remembered it being built / or at least when it was new / when people lived there / when the couch on the porch held waving neighbors / not dust and rain stains / before the vines and weeds overtook the place / before I was born / because / as long as I’ve been alive it’s been dying / a testament to the weight of history / as if each day passing were a single leaf that collects atop me / trying to topple me / until too many straws break the camel / or at least his back.
It’s as if / driving by / in the backseat / through those little windows / the triangles / I saw a piece of it fall off with every pass / with every visit to your house / and now I wonder / I know / or pretend to know but still wonder / why you chose to draw these places of decay / these dilapidated taverns / these rural ruins:
It was to remember / it was to represent / it was to be read / though I’m sure I’m not your ideal reader / I read you / I write you / a psychic vision graphing time.
You were a scriptophile / mystic recorder of history.
Dudgrick Bevins is an artist and educator from North Georgia. He now lives in New York City with his partner and their very grumpy hedgehog, Ezri. He teachers creative writing and literature.