Unplugged

Nancy Eimers

 

To live inside was the simple first idea behind a house:
a noun
but soft inside.  Lined by down.
My husband is playing Nirvana Unplugged,
Cobain's wail, stripped down to the wood,
is wood--wild, mad--
akin to the Germanic Wut, for “rage.”
His “In the Pines” so bare
each unplugged guitar's a door
slammed home. 
And then, a little while,
all softnesses that line a human nest
are gone: low voices, the velvet art
of sleeping faces, long breaths to sleep
and the long breaths back again.
Home gone down.
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don't ever shine.
Jesus, they're fighting again.
Who?  I don't know, everybody, everybody.
The woman and man in the song,
my husband and me. Sometimes,
next door a father shouts at his son, thirteen,
who sobs tightly from the frail shoulders all the way down.
Wood mad.  Ready to clobber
his bigger father.  Oh yeah.  As if.
To live inside a tidy box: wasn't that the idea?
I will shiver . . . and the trees have snuck
out of their skeletons again, it's late,
the khaki green of a house across the street
spills from its military square
the whole night through.
In the bluegrass version, Bill Monroe's high whine
mimicks the blue-and-gray edges
of wind sawing back and forth in the deepening
graygreen pines;
but Cobain's is all black shriek.  An act of erasure.
Someone is rubbing the paper hard . . .
lead bleeds, the paper tears.  No color for that.
My girl, my girl, don't lie to me--
a soft black wind
is rubbing out her part in the song.  Poor little girl.  She has no       home.
She has no voice
but the pines.
The common nighthawk lays its eggs on a gravel roof,
no nest--
the killdeer burrows in a cinder bed, its eggs are
spotted, scrawled on, blotched buff-and-black
to look like trash.
I'm going where the cold wind blows.
Who says that?--no one says that
mouthless howl.
Where are we going?
Unplug the lights in the houses,
what becomes of us?  Killdeer may even nest in broken glass between the ties of railroad tracks still in use,
but we--
unplug our houses, and how dark
do we become? 
I can hear the neighbor boy still sobbing
madly onto the breast of the family station wagon.