Soul
My only soul, a dollar-bill soul, bailed out but in thrall
to fool’s gold, too full of itself, a little dulled
to the cruel,
a guile-thrilled, of-all-the-gall, full-of-bull soul
peeled raw, too shallow to spill, told
to veil what it steals well,
and skilled at it, having curled
in on itself like a scroll,
having yellowed like an old skull.
So I’ll say no, it’s not a soul delivered with a caul,
not the failed, American soul
I’m hauling through the world.
No, it’s not a hardball soul drilled foul,
not a humbled, called-
and-coming-in-to-a-simple-meal soul,
willing to kneel but not to crawl,
cool to slow-roll awhile and sit still.
No, my soul travels
as a cold-spell-in-the-hills, peal-of-a-church-bell,
smell-of-coal, let’s-go-bowling, you-can-all-
go-straight-to-hell soul,
so real we have fallen ill, a tin-foil-grail
of a soul so pale it chills the pillow where my head falls.
Corrections
Our front-page story entitled “Evil Twin,”
misidentified a certain black man as the evil twin.
He is evil, yes, but not a twin. We apologize.
Our in-depth investigation, “Caucasian Man
Levitates” repeats a curious mistake.
He was never in the air after all. We failed to see that.
In “Suicide by Walking” we identified a certain tune
as “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Its true title, of course,
is, and always has been, “Mississippi Goddam.”
Come on, who could be sorrier than we are? In our
profile, “Unarmed Youth Planned to Be Doctor,”
a bizarre auto-correct kicked in, so the word dead
appeared as the word black, as in “he was pronounced
black at the scene.” We apologize to the family.
Indeed, it is tragic that your son is black, but look,
there it goes again. Our system was always tricky.
We hear it’s being fixed. If we should whistle Dixie,
well, we’re so sorry, we do it unconsciously.