October Elegy

The following poem is being published in the 2009 edition of Limestone (University of Kentucky).


OCTOBER ELEGY


for Fred Burdette

It started in his lungs, black and tar-spackled.
Spread to his liver, stomach, intestine. Soon his
legs refused to carry him, and when he could
no longer hobble to the toilet on those shriveled
bone-stalks, it was my aunt who came to stay.
She tended him. Sat in the heat of his bedroom.
Tolerated, for hours on end, the scent of urine
and ether. Knew the heaving burn of his chest.
Bathing him, hands pressing against his pallid skin,
she must have noticed the scars: ones from the
war flecking the right flank of his torso, a new one
from the surgery cleaving the column of his ribs.
In the heavy light of those afternoons she read to
him, stories that reminded him of the Belgian winter,
huddled in a foxhole, 1945, burying his body in
the earth to absorb the heat of another’s breathing.
When the pain became too much, it was she who
bore his screams: In his madness he’d wail deep
into the night, cursing her with the low growl of
his voice. Later, as things began to dissipate, he
babbled to her with a lolling cluck of the tongue,
his language, mind, mangled with obscenity.

Literary LEO

The poem, "Dandelion Wine," posted somewhere below, was selected for recognition in the Poetry Division of the Literary LEO Writing Contest.  Look for it in the Jan. 28th issue of the LEO.

New Poem

LIGHT

There are limits to what can be said:
The warm dander of belly-morning skin.
This amuses me: kitchen clatter,
stainless-steel pots and pans,
a kettle on the stove warming water for tea.
I am sitting at the table watching light
filter gray through the East-facing window.
A cardinal perches on the second-
story outer sill – and what of that
brilliant feather-red crown of tuft?
Later tonight I will switch the lamps down low,
and we will burn candles, whisper kisses to 
each other in their dim flame – like last week
when we made love to shingle-patter rain,
finished, and waited on the back porch
for the thick of August heat,
breathed-in wetness from the air.

Pulling a Stump

"Pulling a Stump" was first written in March. The idea, in the beginning, was to capture the perpetual existence of the tree - the stump. Perhaps it remains only in spirit or in memory, but that is enough. The tree persists nonetheless; hence the comparison in the first stanza, "The old stump... stands out/like a scar in the unplowed field." Like a scar, which reminds us of an event in the distant past - a pain, even - the cleft in the dirt left by the uprooted stump reminds the reader of the tree. As the scar continues to remind the bearer of a fleeting moment of the past, allowing that moment to replay over and over in the mind, the fissure reminds us of the tree. In that vein the tree continues to exist, its memory perpetuating in our minds, allowing the tree to transcend its own being - the temporality of the world - and in a sense become eternal.

PULLING A STUMP

The old stump, a black thing
with roots stretching
deep into the earth, stands out
like a scar in the unplowed field.
Today, Father and I go into
the field to pull it.

We carry shovels and pickaxes,
hopes to sever the roots
of the nourishing dirt -
to break the flat top into bits
of dead-gray wood.

My axe breaks it in two,
and with a few more swings,
to pieces of earthy mulch.

Next come the shovels.
We heave them into the dirt,
splitting the roots
near the base.
I push the shovel head
beneath the broken roots,
and we lift the stump
bottom-up from the ground.

We drop it into the bed
of Father's pick-up
and drive it off the field.

All that is left is a fissure
in the earth,
where next year dandelions
will flower out,
reminding us of a tree uprooted.

Faith

Good writing often comes when it is least expected. Over the last several weeks I have found myself mulling over old poems, reading work by new poets, subscribing to new magazines - all in search of inspiration. I wanted to write something fresh. Something new. Ever since I came back from Guatemala in March it seemed I hadn't been able to write anything good. Nothing was coming together - which, at least in my experience, is what a good poem must do on its own. Finally, last week, it hit me. I don't know what it was, but something clicked. I found myself writing out what became a two-page long poem. Then, last night, lying in bed and looking up at the ceiling, contemplating what it means to find peace and where I had seen it most in my life, it came again. The words started turning over in my mind. At first it was just a tone, then an image. Soon it became sounds, which then formed into words. Finally, I had to get up. I had to write this down before I forgot the words so perfectly wrought in my creative conscious. This is what came.


FAITH

Zacapa, where hot
wind whistles
in tamarind trees
and we lay star staring
on the roof at night,
the sing-song sound
carried to our ears,
and through the leaves
we saw it –
a single-room church
with white plastic
chair pews, where dirty,
starving, people still
come to pray.

Dandelion Wine

A poem written in early spring, on a line from Thomas Pynchon's 'The Crying of Lot 49.'

DANDELION WINE

In April, you gathered weeds
from the field,
made dandelion wine -
blithe-picked flowers
for drink,
and the old ones, white windborne seeds,
to blow into the air.

Crushed yellow on the pestle,
you bled the juice
into bottles, added yeast,
let it sit, fermenting over months.

The next year, when we opened it,
you poured the wine,
gold into my glass.
We drank -
nourishing ghosts of dandelions,
the dead persisting in a bottle of wine.

Steer

The following poem, "Steer," is one I began working on in mid-December. I can hardly remember working for so long on a single poem, writing and rewriting, filling my journal with revisions. I cut, then expanded, then cut some more. Finally I was able to come up with a draft that I liked. It's been sitting for some time.

Now that it is finished (or at least as close to finished as I can make it), there are a number of things I admire about it - the description of the Texas landscape, the steer wandering off from the ranch, the quick process of dying, and the slow process of decay. The last lines beg the reader to ask the question: what does this all mean? Where is the purpose behind the process of decay; breaking life into dirt? And, of course, what follows: what is the reason for living, if only to return to dust?


STEER

Death is a way of speaking,
breaking bits of life into dirt.
In August, the raw mountains
of Mexico shade the plain,
which stretches out across the
border into the Texas sun.
Thickets of brush grow where
the river dries up, its many
estuaries reduced to small
pools, stagnant water in
channels of red-dry rock.
A little way out from the stream,
a steer wanders off from Laughlin Ranch,
grunting with each step, hooves
catching on cracks in the soil.
Stumbling into the red rock-bed,
his joints go limp, body collapses.
In silence, he stares toward
the mountain shade.
Within the hour the steer’s
eyes tire and go dry – he dies.
Over days, weeks, his eyes
come to harbor shadows,
empty to the open air.
His teeth become exposed.
His chest, a bare cage of bone.
A cloud of orange dust rises
in the desert breeze, fades
to gold as it reaches eye level.