Progeny

Wrapped in a pied cloak
of metaphors, I’m comfortable,
and quiet is kept—for now.
Maybe later,
seed-thoughts will blossom
into audible fruit,
persimmon, pomegranate,
mango, and melon.
Later maybe,
seeds will fall
and produce reality
after their own kind

**

Forest Furniture

For a moment
I imagined I was in the kidneys
of a sprawling organism; moss-haired
stones with rustic round faces

lay in a congregation, nestled
in the pith of the woods.
These mammoth sentinels stood watch
atop hills while others laid in wait,

monkeys on the backs of earthen mounds.
Interest arrested the hourglass,
and my curiosity staged a coup.
With the crowbar of question

I pried:
Do you cry or even care
when the forest things crawl
up close and die beside you?

The lithic host turned a stone-deaf ear.
Stoically they held their peace
as if they stood on their tongues.
Only the litter of autumn’s trashy

woodland floor, stirred by a capricious
breeze rose it’s head to rustle at me.
Then I understood, not every question
has to be invoked.

So I bit my tongue
until I tasted sweet metallic flavor,
smiled, and took a seat—
on the forest furniture.

**

I’m Listening

I could hear salt
popping from my pores
as the ocean sheen
dried on my beached body.
The sea sang its ditty
along the shore and I felt
each grain of sand slip
out of place, moved
by the aquatic chorus.
Swooshing, sea oats did
a to and fro, wind swept
by earthly rhythms.

**

Wishes

You wish your water
was as wet as mine,
your sunrise as surreal.

Don’t you wish
your spangle maker
sparkled like mine,
your fire as blue and still.

You wish your ice
was as cold as mine,
your sunset as superb.

I wish you had
a peace like mine,
your happiness
as unfettered.

**

What Id Is
—for Sigmund

A velvet hooded hammer with teeth
eyes and a tongue that smells
emotion and decimates carnal sensation.

The flesh, a many headed hydra
stalks the halls of human frailty.
From our cranial cages a coiled boa

strikes, then hisses, Hurt so good:
wraps around and whispers, one more time.
A devil in drag, the flesh covets

the ins, the outs, the musky in-between,
treasures things that pleasure
and wholly swallows the heart of life.

The flesh puts the Id in idiot.

**

Cosmeticus Predatorius
—for Bobbi and Channel

In an ocean of ambient
white florescent light,
swim cut-throat barracudas
with cat’s claws. They wear
glossy smiles and their eyes
dance and sparkle,
couched by lush
lashes beneath heavy
shadow; their business,
pushing the paint, plaster
and polish necessary
to underscore
how glamorous
you
already
are.

**

Conflict Resolution

I know better now
so why can’t I do
better now? The irony
thrashes my conscience
like a buffalo in a crystal closet.

I wallow on a bed of shattered glass
tormented in hellish slumber,
twisted in sweaty sheets
of self-sabotage.

Why can’t I wake up?

From inside a gilded hourglass
the Sandman blasts my heart
with barbs of doubt
that sear and roast
like desert sunlight.

My nightmares are his spawn,
fork-tongued fiends
created to constrict.
Soon these hellions will
slither from my psyche,

unless I smash their eggs
with the steel-souled boots of truth.

**

Blind-Sided

When nothing’s inside
even the shell
has empty meaning.

Not long ago, I stood
at the pinnacle of my own
precious molehill of pomp.

A ludicrous popinjay
gorged on arrogance—
I adored my glow.

Starry-eyed with deceit’s
illusions, I trusted
alcohol promises,

and flashy as pyrite
in noonday sun,
I was all I never had.

A jester thieving the king’s scepter,
I couldn’t see the darkness
swallowing my horizon.

I was a fish in the sewer
of all about me.
My Self, detached,

leered as defeat rose
and squarely smashed
my saccharine scene.

**

Biography

Strangled by straps
of suspension,
inwardly tumbling downward
through dark corridors,
drowned in dissolution—
Look up!
Ahead there’s hope.
Slipping on soap,
choked up on dope smoke,
recall what was said—
There’s hope!
Pick providence now.
Never let it wither,
to rot on the vine.

**

Ember

Her hair is…not a bizarre,
wicked clown orange, not like
an umpa-lumpa’s face, but more
like a penny hot off the presses.
Not sanguine, crazy Chucky red
or bottled magenta number nine,
more like burnished metal,
turned resplendent by the blacksmith’s
fire. With curves soft as her syllables,
her eyes are carved jade, dazzling
in a diamond-dusted patina. When she
talks I hang on her lisp, the provocative
game her lips play with S sounds,
the unmistakable seduction
of her velveteen Yeth’s—
those dulcet sibilations. I watch,
enthralled by the sight
of the sounds her mouth makes.

**

Understood

Mutual excitement brings to light
hidden roadways trifling pleasures
left  unmentioned,
while conversation uncovers
the other lonely in-betweens.

We release passion
from the prison our misery
fashioned by speaking
luscious words in faith
with grace. As hope sweetens

the sensation, communion
is quickened
by commitment. Finally
life and love find a night
to laugh and play.

**

For You

I would raise a ruckus
at the door of Death
himself, wring his neck
and bring his head to you,
his mouth chock-full of apple.
You’re a sphinx, a quean

that frustrates and delectates,
elevates and irritates.
You’re a ride
through milk and honey,
a scamper over blazing embers—
the Gala to my Dali.

**

In the Pumpkin Patch

I recline to relish the feeling
and celebrate the sensation.
Daytime’s onyx alter-ego,
dreamy eyed in a tiara of jewels
hovers above, fitting heaven’s

dome like a kippah.
Beneath this accommodation I swoon,
rapt by the power of your passion.
Your caress is like a soft,
warm breeze in late November.

I hold my breath to make it tingle
to the point of a tickle.
Then I become your fingers,
you become my heart,
because we share the same soul.

**

Bury the Bone

On a gently flowing breeze that rolled home
sweetly to me—a bouquet of flowers in her hair.
“Woman…” luscious and soft lips spoke
breathlessly, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Daisy?” was the question she answered with.
Capricious as a child, she blew me a smile.
Delighted, I kissed it and said, “Look what I
gave you, a kiss from my lips to place it in your lap.
My blood pump thumped, then—Tap to booming,
booming to boombap. “Open up, I’m here. It’s me
you heard rap, softly against your astral plane.
I’m cold, standing here naked in this ice pick rain.”
Against the window hidden beneath the shadow of me,
I saw her staring, face pressed to the cerebral glass.
“Why won’t you let me in?” Question marked my face.
“Is it because you’re afraid?”
She smiled with her taunt. “Who cares what you say.
What I have, is what you want.”
“Open wide. Let me in, I say.” Our dialog worked
like my desire’s own soliloquy. The fire in my belly
burned as I looked from the outside in. Her eyes beamed
from the inside out. I flashed a scowl, and then….
She opened her inside and purred, “Good dog.
Let’s bury that bone!”

**

Escape from the Beautiful But Too Small Box

In the puddle
of our elation she and I
spoon, rapt by the buoyancy
of being. Electric current comes
in mega-loads and hums
around us, through us.
We bask in heaven’s limelight,

envy of the angels.
Juiced on dopamine cocktail
we two with one eye,
delight in Psyche’s dance
through sunshine’s
moon-lit alter-ego.
With a wink and a nod,

we dismiss her.
Now divorced from her,
swaddled in the Spirit,
we breech the black hole
horizon of orgasm’s little death.
We repose there and await
the resurrection of arousal.

**

Hurricane Jillene

Once upon a time not at all
long ago, in a land so very
near, in the kingdom of the prince
of the power of the air…

sexploitation’s milky fluid
curdled in my eyes.
Profane pharmaceuticals,
soul sewage, gushed

like broken glass
through my mind.
My libido packed an urgent load—
obsession with the pudding

in the box. I saw women as vapors,
figments of flesh and blood,
more like trees with golden
knot-holes, oozing sticky sap.

Women were a source
of sensation, portals into the lowest
human donnybrook.
During that period of time

I met her.
She was a will o’ the wisp,
from out of nowhere she appeared,
a nether mist. Shifting into woefully

more than a sexual point of supply,
she became a pea soup
that would not be burned off.
With the switch of her hip

my ship was capsized
and the surge of her ocean,
the gale force of her enthrall,
swept me away.

**

Sugar Coated and Sticky Sweet

Soft
like filigree feathers
your voice
licks me and I get
all mighty inside
sugar coated and sticky sweet
there’s nowhere to run
no place to hide
smokey soft
it trips me
to places I’ve yet
to dream
when I awake
the dreams
are remembered
as reality seems
sugar coated and sticky sweet
what I’d wish
if wishes came
true is to spend my life
listening to you
sugar coated and sticky sweet.

**

Darker Than Coal

My shine is sucked from me into the holes
of your eyes. Your silence is a list of reasons,
a wet carpet that can’t fly—

but I can. Without deference
I spread the pinions of my opinion
and swat down opposition’s debate.

Swept up on my own hot air thermals, I do pirouettes
with sunbeams and waltz with milky moon stone
through lofty thoughts, in and out in and out of thin air.

You are the devil in a black velvet dress.
Inside you burns a soul darker than coal.

An osprey with thunderbird ambition,
an eagle with an Icarus wingspan,
Never look into the sun—

but how can a peacock bypass his own reflection?
The frost calls to me, the boxer of shadows, a deliberate
dancer who courts immortality knowing that

bricks, boards and heavy-bags don’t punch back.
Hypnotized by double mirror vision, I ride a comet chard
and punch through the astral loopty-loop to dictate

the indecipherable. Chisels of dynamite
strapped to my thighs, I sculpt a frieze infested
with contagious verbiage, set on infecting the field.

You are the devil in a black velvet dress.
Inside you burns a soul darker than coal.

From the mind-field I calibrate my personal time
space continuum. Rooted but reaching, a lexicon
climbs the boughs and branches of my psychic canopy.

Cockatoos and toucans swoop low through a rainforest
of lucid consciousness into the nether domain of the rime
scaled juggernaught. Out from the top of my brain cell ceiling

I’m resurrected with cursive dreams set in concrete,
spouting dialogue from antediluvian lore.
Your sickening silence swings like a scythe,

slicing through me. The way you smile is cyanide.
In your eyes I see phantasms, and truth
darker than coal.

**

To Tell the Truth

there’s a certain smile
that comes when I hear
you speak. My eyes twinkle
when I watch you,

I’m  carried away
in your wake
when you pass me by.
I want to eat you—

hold you and lick you,
until you melt
like a Hershey’s kiss.
But how can tell this

to a righteous woman,
one who I love like sunshine,
a woman I lust for
like my next breath?

**

Three Hundred And Sixty Degrees

Carolina’s blue unfurls.
Serenity’s gate is opened wide.
Ruby dances iridescent.
Passion never sleeps.
Summer sun’s vehement glower

is spent and through autumn’s palette
hand in glove we traipse
into the skeletal forest.
Winter throws long shadows
haunted by ashen remains.

Satisfied
a hibernal sun hangs low
and smiles honeyed rays
that play hide and seek
through bare-naked trees.

Love’s oven burns.
We gambol in the flames
untouched by the bitter
bite of winter, until
the dogwoods bloom

and flash their glorious white.
Seasons come and go
but fixed and planted deep,
our union endures
ever-living, evergreen.

**

Acknowledgements

The poet wishes to thank the editors and publishers of the following magazines and blogs in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:

Blind Man’s Rainbow: “Hurricane Jillene”

Charlotte Viewpoint: “Cosmeticus Predatorius”

Iodine Poetry Journal: “Sugar Coated and Sticky Sweet”

Romance the Muse: “Bury the Bone” and “Darker Than Coal”

The rabbit jerks in ache and panic,
her foot captive in the snare.
The trapper is on his rounds
to check for fur and food.
Long ears fill with dry limbs
cracking under boots closing in.

Sometimes the jaws of fate
demand payment in installments.
As time gnaws, so too the rabbit
quickly chews off her foot
and frees herself from all but pain.
She flees into the shadows
to pay for the rest of her life.

The trapper curses his loss
but pins a chain to the foot,
to be forever linked to the one
who didn’t completely get away.
This, he says,
will bring me luck.

**

Fairy Tale

I’ll be handsome before your eyes change.
We have our song, the only one we’ll need.
On long walks crickets sing along.
All is in tune. The slippers fit.

Another night, you are scrub-woman
to a different dream. You walk alone
down some raining road
where mud serenades your bare feet.
The frogs hum with you, not a prince among them.
A jack-o-lantern rots around the candle.

I hop along a dusty road where the wind is hot
and sings too loudly in my ears,
and the snakes rattle their tambourines.
My feet burn but go on to deeper fire,
a misremembered kiss that burns
you wrongly at the stake.

Ours are the dreams of shapeshifters.
All around our kingdom, the stars are dimmer,
the moon eclipsed by mountains too high to climb.
But clear days, bejeweled nights come back in time.
You’ll be beautiful before the light changes.

**

Dixie Tourist Trap

Outside Billy Jo’s diner, three ol’ boys chewing tobacco
and toothpicks lean over the back of an empty pickup.
Each connects his hands as in a prayer for rain.
The only drizzle here is where their tobacco spits
hit the dust.

The empty cargo space is somehow the conduit
to depth of understanding and meaningful discourse.
They stare at the blue metal floor as though it might melt
into heaven or tell them secrets. Or maybe
this is where to mourn the year’s failed crops.

They all know when to talk, when to spit.
The small talk is of pea-size melons in the field,
of Billy Jo’s melons, of neighbor Jack’s old hound,
why he keeps chasing trucks when that damn fleafarm
has a hundred big tire tracks up his back.
“That dog don’t hunt small game no more.”
Between tobacco spits, they all nod their bobbleheads.

When a yankee they just call “The Donald,” out of place
but sure he owns the town, steers his Hummer into the diner lot,
the glare of his dollar-green sunglasses makes them squint.
Sucking in a loud Cuban cigar, the Hummerman blows big wheels
of smoke rings into the pickup bed, offers “Here’s some rain
clouds for you guys.”

Good ol’ boys know they have multiple choices:
Will they slide over silently to make room?
Will they offer to take him snipe hunting?
Will they grin, shake his hand, hand him a chew?

Inside, the diner crowd bets they’ll spit-shine his shoes.

**

Grandmother

On your farm I was an orphan, the black sheep,
the bookworm who bore into stories and poems
that never grew a single thing to eat, or bought
new winter shoes, or fixed your broken heart.

To you I wasn’t worth a beating. Yet you schooled me
in the motorized mule of tradition handed down
to plow a duty to make me the man I should be,
one not afraid to get his hands dirty.

You’d frown, remind me that my cousins
sure could work: “Them boys love this land,
so the land loves them.” They were making hay
then, while all I did was dream on the puzzle of us all.

I do love the land, love those who work it,
but I treasure most what grows in spite
of my poisonous kind, the 300-year-old
oaks sagging with songbirds, the tall green
grass stalks dancing like soulmates of the wind,
a summer rain swelling the creeks with movement,
but a downpour cursing you with muddy well water.

Perhaps like you I lost the whitest dream clouds.
The soil we shared stained us both, got in our eyes,
but a new dream floats in the fog of me,
more down to earth now like wispy white river ghosts.

We grew from the same soil if not the same spirit.
Your seed is firmly planted here, but mine is in the wind.
I never talked about dreams to you who seemed to have none,
whose hope was saying grace and Sunday School,
which I left for a bigger, perhaps crueler world,
thirsting for the spirit whispered by a river.

I never told you how peace and helping
hands should be chores of our choosing,
how birds of a feather sometimes choke together,
how wings and dreams spread wider if we tend them,
how rivers wind their way if we do not dam them.

Walking the dog leg, no sense
of time, space, or direction
just the taste for mimosa.

Birds and boats, gondolas
and the old firehouse, the
art, not just no flash

but no photos, thank you,
and scripts, stories, plates,
the trifecta in the sun

where three meander through
starfish talk. Insulated outside
the city lights, they connect the dots,

but do not touch, hewing
instead to wit and map and
walking the godforsaken dog leg.

**

What I heard on the train

Tax advice and investments
too, he told her she should
move money between

accounts. He told her,
but she didn’t want to mix
the mortgage with the rest

and she didn’t believe
him when he said it’s all in
the same place anyway.

Then there was the question
of dinner and if his daughter
had cooked, please God, no.

They were quiet. He called
the daughter and asked where
she’d like to be taken for dinner.

**

What I saw from the train

tired worn green house
in the middle of nowhere
broken panes of glass

somebody lived there once,
chose that shade of hope green,
now gone all to seed

**

Hurricane Like a Nor’easter

each wave subsides
raising a tide of cricketsong
even as the wind pitches again
toward shrieking

rivers fall and flow in drops
white stones on tumbled cloud gray
slashing along rooftops
branch-dragged

after two no-rainbow days
the rivers keep rising
putting the lie to the pacifist sky

She was nearly as old
as the red brick house
where she lived and
she was a proper, old-fashioned lady,
a widow with a son and
daughter-in-law who dutifully, but
reluctantly checked on her
once a week but it was
her grandson, my friend Kevin,
that she cared about.

He visited her almost every day and
she made him little finger sandwiches and
chocolate milk with real cocoa and
one day I visited her with Kevin and
she treated me like I actually belonged in her house
instead of being the poor side of town mutt that I was.

Many years later I came back and saw the
red brick house and thought of that kind
little grandmother and my friend—both
gone many years now—and I felt the
emptiness of long life and the vanity of hope and
ambition and I missed the days of my youth terribly but
they are long past and, hard as I try to hold onto them,
fading further into the depths of diminishing memory
soon to be unremembered and extinguished.

**

New Year’s Eve: Mazatlan

From the second floor patio outside
his room at the Mar del Pacifico hotel,
he heard the sound of the unseen ocean
lapping against old Mazatlan’s
crumbling concrete sea wall.

It was New Year’s Eve, and
to the north, twenty minutes by city bus,
were new hotels, new bars,
catering to new tourist needs and
college kids down for the holidays.

Life in the old town was slower, quieter—
a good place to wait for a long-expected call.

Downstairs, at the check-in desk, checking again.

“No, señor,” for the fourth time, nada, nothing yet.
“No problem,” he said, “thanks anyway.”

Upstairs, New Year’s arriving,
an opened bottle of red wine
meant to be shared,
a full glass poured, drained,
another poured.

Letting milk chocolate
dissolve with more wine,
he went back out onto the patio,
listened to the sea, the softly lapping sea,
its rhythms gentle, monotonous, constant.

Somewhere down the beach to the right
the sound of revelers, the explosion of fireworks.
There was no mistaking this change from old to new,
a fait accompli.

Back in the room then, the silent, empty room,
there was no stopping time, it went with you or without you,
carried you along—with no options,
no going back, only forward,
there was nothing else to be done.

**

Orphan

Cold mist drifting down
floating onto gravestones,
coating them with a silvery sheen.
In back, beyond the last graves, a
huge oak tree, leafless,
limbs gnarled, bark as gray as the
dull sky above.

Nearer, graves of great-aunts and uncles,
nearly-forgotten faces vaguely recalled, and
closer still the closer ones—grandparents,
sisters and brothers of mothers and fathers,
all gone now, lives echoing only in memory,
joy, pain, all struggles over now.

And closest yet, mother, father,
empty places in heart and mind,
gone now, nor flesh nor touch
never felt again,
the empty, unfilled places,
not to be filled, ever,
solo then, without parent,
alone for the rest of time,
time’s child, time’s orphan.

**

To Stop a Cockfight

They went down to Cuba by themselves,
avoiding the usual emotional hangers-on,
to soak up the ambience maybe
or to dry him out or soak up more
alcohol or self-pity or whatever it was
they liked to soak in—
he for his writing, she for her art.

She was still recovering
from yet another nervous collapse
that his drinking, philandering, and more drinking
did little to stave off.

They went to the Floridita and drank where
they and Papa used to drink and stayed in a fine hotel
and got themselves a driver who knew where
all the good stuff was hidden in those hot
sultry Havana nights and he told the driver
to take them where the action was.

The driver pulled up to a Gallera,
opened the doors for them.
The experience they sought lay within
the driver insisted, beyond that green door
over there.

Inside it was a madhouse.
Perfect for her. It made her feel normal.
The bettors were yelling, their birds squawking,
Chicken blood flying.

They were in trouble right away.
She flirted ostentatiously with the men,
he laughed and leered suggestively.

When the first cock was cut,
when its back legs were sliced and
dangling uselessly, she cried,
screamed at him to stop the fight.

Gallantly, he strode toward the ring
demanded an end to the slaughter,
argued with the gamblers, the officials,
threw a bottle at the cocks.

In a heartbeat, the gamblers were on him
kicking, hitting, beating him nearly senseless.
She cried at the violence, tried to rescue him,
was pushed aside roughly.

Luckily the driver intervened,
drug them out of the place, apologized,
dropped them at a hospital.

Inside, she worried his battered, once handsome face,
begged help for him, got him a room.

After, she went back stateside without him,
resumed her treatment.
He was flown home to a hospital,
to dry out and recover.

For the next eighteen months they exchanged letters
but they never saw each other again.
Then one day his overtaxed heart simply gave up.
She may or may not have cried, no one could tell,
she completed her treatment, made a new life for herself,
never once looked back.

Explore the sweet, delicious South
where you’ll grow pretty over tea
and magnolia pie,
hear dark fragrant music
in sweet syrup of night,
and consider it to be
poetry well-spent.

**

Old Florida Creek
—for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I will write of this,
my grey shadow
walking dripping paths,
and then realize my righted words
are wrapped here
in this place that speaks so piercingly.

I will write of sounds somehow clean
and sharp in stillness of air,
sun-faded musty roses,
crisp and shrinking on a pillow.

Is blue brighter here?

I dig deep into resistant rock,
water goes from trickle to flood,
and it rains in the trees.

Memory and experience paint the light.

**

Eugenia’s Ghost

Some say Eugenia
hangs mirrors in the trees
under ragged, lacy swags
of Spanish moss,
spreads her full skirts over sweetgrass
(there!)
lining the ink-black marsh,
twists tendrils of
long
brown
hair
around nervous fingers
and says—
“Gone is such a simple word”
but little else

(We’ve seen her picture,
hand-tinted.)
and adds her own stars
to the waiting sky.

**

The Rhyming Game

Brown blown leaves
measure our grief.
We dress our white gowns
with pale blooms,
watery-pink reflected.

We walk along infinity
for a brief eternity
until the river runs
red,
upturned,
clay,
and slippery.

In my Texas high school, being Jewish was
freakish enough.  I certainly
didn’t have any heroes, but
I thought Marian Zimmerman was the shit.
At 16, she wore a femme-y leather jacket
and smoked cigarettes with one arm dangling
out the car window and one knee
propped up to rest her smoking hand on.
Most of the girls in my youth group
weren’t having sex, but I found the ones
who were, in the back cabin – the last one
before the woods
that no one was staying in.

Today, working with a group of adolescents
who have already been diagnosed,
I see myself, who could have been diagnosed.
The monthly religious conversions were a “warning sign,”
though of what I’m not sure.
The way I came home from youth group one weekend
and decided I was a vegetarian,
or the odd obsession with Charles Manson
and splicing tapes backwards that
occupied most of the seventh grade – those
were warning signs as well, I’m sure.

I certainly don’t long for adolescence, or the days
of sneaking out of Anna’s second story bedroom window
because of her father’s fury.
We hadn’t done anything but talk
those late nights, and neither of us would come out
for another couple years. I used to listen to Janis Joplin
croon and wish I could have known her
like my father did, or better yet
that she had survived her own high school scars
long enough to have known me.  This was
years before swooning over Ani Difranco,
or going to punk shows like 7 Year Bitch.

Back then, there was only Joan Jett.
She loves rock ‘n’ roll, yeah, but
it was her other tracks that seduced me quickly. Her angry
growl when she was “frustrated,”  and the
sweet cover of “Crimson and Clover.”
When she sang: “I don’t hardly know her
but I think I could love her” – I knew
there were options.
Even if it would be years till I tried them,
years till I named them.

Back then, I was completely
unsure of who I was
but knew enough to know
I didn’t care.

The story never varied at the start:
there wasn’t enough flour or grease
so she prayed hard as she ever had.

Interrupted by a tap on the screen door,
a sad looking man stood there asking
if she had some work he might do for a meal.

She offered him cool water,
got him to tote some yard trash out back
and settled in to make what she could

with what she had there was sufficient
for him to take a couple on the road
wrapped in cloth with muscadine jelly.

My Aunts Margaret and Wynter Grace
were still little babies, gobbled every crumb,
kept them full till Papaw could get home.

He worked in Houston then, hard times,
everybody had hard times, but Palestine
wasn’t all that far, and he made city money.

She told me that visitor was an angel
sent from Elijah to reveal her faith,
she must’ve passed ‘cause they had enough.

Everybody got fed at her house, friends,
strangers, even gypsies, like the one
who prophesied I would be born a star

destined to see the world my own way.
After that, Travellers let her house be,
they left their mark on the sidewalk

so she would be safe from drifters and scams.
Turned out true, too, even at ninety-five
no one ever took advantage of her.

Except she could never keep me full
of biscuits or pan gravy. The memory
rolls on my tongue when I get Hardee’s

(a hard comparison) and I miss her stories
Once, I thought I saw an angel by the fig tree
at the house on Caroline, watching out

when Aunt Genelle left the upstairs door
wide open while we went to Saltillo to shop,
but that’s a start to a whole different tale.

**

Song and Dance

The old ones are dropping off the radar
faster than rotary phones, usable transoms,
cheap gas, and popping the clutch on a hill.

Tom’s mom fell, Susie died while knitting,
Genelle hangs on because she’s contrary,
and Russ simply stopped, just like that.

We shuffle through wondering who’s next,
what it will mean to be the last one to ask,
the story-teller, the only one who remembers.

Even poets fall back on massaging metaphors
into credible elegies, measuring blank verse
out in coffee spoons. Some tribute.

Today, I picked out my funeral hymns, swearing
I’ll get a hold on my affection for gimcrackery,
write names and dates on all these photographs.

Now is the time to reflect in this moment,
tomorrow I get busy, there will never be
enough time, labels, or plastic containers.

It isn’t being mortal I mind, it’s the old ones
tumbling before me that brings this side-step,
hoping no one calls me out to go too soon

**

Always from Pasadena, Texas

Since the day she looked in the rearview mirror
watching the state line sign shrink to a dot
she hasn’t looked back, hasn’t wanted to return-
not for them, not to see anybody special anymore.

Life was hard sky and welfare food for some time-
canned meat, peanut butter and white beans so much
it was twenty years before she could bide them again.

If it was too hot, the family slept on the hood of the car,
waking to flies in their faces, ants crawling in shoes.

When it rained, they’d all snuggle up inside, rolled
doodle bug style in the seats. Nobody paid attention
in those days, people didn’t meddle, they might
be nice enough to offer coffee or some food,
but anyone on the road knows what not to take,
where not to sleep, even with everything locked.

She hopes no one can tell what she went through,
and they can’t, but there’s a whiff of hard times
that clings to her choices, informs every movement,
she falls between extravagance and penny-pinching.

It’s in her voice when she orders at fancy restaurants,
at parties in big houses with lots of mucky-mucks,
she can’t help still seeing herself as a little girl
in charity shoes more at ease at Walmart than Saks.

She always finds herself chatting up old bartenders
at Windsor Farms affairs. They talk about the city,
make fun of the snoots, wonder what’s gonna change
two insignificant people making very small talk.

She’ll never go back again but can’t seem to wash
the stink of refineries out of her clothes, or grow up.
No matter how much she reads, how much she learns
she’s that kid in the rearview mirror, leaving home.

**

Attainable love

won’t show its face  in a crowd, meet you
wearing a red carnation or be your BFF.

The very fact it’s
*attainable*
should be of some concern–Groucho knew that.

Of the two of you it’s the most disorganized.

It will always be <  in any equation,
near the bottom in social stratification.

It will never  pick up after itself,
make the bed, put the seat down,
take out the trash.

Not even when it leaves,
you in tears.

Heady with lust within the scent
of sweet olive, dusk
descends chasing sunlight
across weathered bricks into
intimate corners where the green faerie
and fingers intermingle across
a wrought iron table top.
A thin sheen of sweat glistens
above her upper lip,
a hint of saltiness that melts
on his tongue.

**

Blown Away

In the time before the wind she
couldn’t imagine a life without him.
Long languid days drifted together,
shared conversations and whispered
secrets, dreams imagined and fulfilled.
Then the wind blew through, expectations
scattered and complacency tumbled.
Havoc rolled in on the hot breath of
August.

**

Chimera (A Wild and Unrealistic Dream or Notion)

All I want on a Sunday morning is to
luxuriate in my laziness. I want to watch
old movies with the volume turned up loud,
the newspaper crackling as I shift my supine
body on the couch, the words of duplicitous
politicians and photos of narcissistic socialites
mashed under my ass.
I want to gaze out my window where heat
rises on the street like steam from a gumbo
pot while I lie, cool as a nectar cream snowball,
in my Maggie The Cat slip, painting my toenails
a color called Bad Influence.
I would sip Southern Wedding Cake coffee
from the chipped china cup I knocked off
the bedside table in a moment of
passion and savor a fresh chocolate croissant,
tender flakiness that melts on the tongue like
vampires melt in the sunlight.
As the sun climbs the sky, I’d meander into the afternoon
with the expectation of an early summer storm when
we would go upstairs and slip between our cool, white
sheets and not be heard from again until
Monday morning.

**

After The Night

Let’s step down this street right now, washed
bright as our shining faces in the early pre-dawn light.
We’ll welcome the cool air of March
on our skin and breathe in the scent of freshly
baking pistolettes as we meander over cobblestones
worn smooth over time by thousands of footsteps.
We’ll watch the pigeons pecking for errant crumbs in
the banquette cracks suddenly startled by the passing
of a lone musician, coronet in one hand and fried
chicken leg in the other, home-bound in his wrinkled
white shirt, the echoes of last night’s melodies swirling
around his receding image.
Rodrigue blues and Hunter reds will pleasure our eyes
and a heavy spring dew will drip, drip, drip from the
galleries, sparkling like fading moon dust on the fragrant
buds of the tea olives. We’ll step into that coffee shop where
steaming mugs of French roast wait for us as the sun rises
over cloudy slate roofs making them shine like a brand new life.

My thoughts
lead me away,
those “poke salad” evenings,
through backwoods trails, to the river’s
long pool.

Where the
waterbugs skate
in eights on still, green water,
the air, set with honeysuckle,
reeks sweet.

Sunlight,
Parting, dimming,
Grassy hues tint the sky
sharing with the late August heat
and damp.

The night
on sluggish feet,
hopes to conceal its awe,
skulking in petty increments
to drape.

Ripple,
the crappie flops
and turns its face over
leaving circles, sating the wish
to see.

**

Song of the South

We were let out on the corner
of Main and Denver
in the sweltering heat,
and skipped to the crosswalk.

We waited for the light to change—
and changes were slow—
to go to the Ritz.

The line led away from the ticket booth
down the cracked sidewalk,
just past the poster marquee
of coming attractions
and next Saturday’s double feature:

The People that Time Forgot
and
The Thing with Two Heads.

Waiting to buy a ticket,
we took a place in line near the far door,
the one with weather-beaten wood that
had the label rubbed off,
but you could read admittance
even without the color.

Inside, the sticky floors
squeaked when you walked
and the cushioned seats clacked
when you stood up to leave.

Whispers when the lights went down,
we watched the Technicolor with wide eyes
as Uncle Remus sang and told us stories.

We were Johnny, Ginny, and Toby.

After the movie was over,
we left our clattering chairs
and walked out like we were in high cotton,
all chattering about our favorite parts:

how the tar can get all over us
if we struggle too hard
or how that br’er rabbit
out-smarted everybody—
even himself, bless his heart—
to get out of bad places.

The tales got better by the retelling,
with happy endings holding in our memory
just around the corner

The movie house was torn down
a few years later,
and all that is left now
is a mud hole in the vacant lot,
and the pawn shop next door.

**

The Side Yard

Maybelle came down the alley
of the side yard
with both tail
and calico coat twitching,
and settled into the cardboard box
we set inside the gate,
lined with Sunday’s funnies
and one of Mama’s old dish towels.

You worried about the demands of birth,
smoothed your skirt
and knelt in the grass patch
by the box all day.

I sat with you in the late morning shade
and brought pink lemonade
when the sun was overhead,
while you whispered
and wrinkled your brow.

When the fifth and last kitten
was cleaned and nuzzled
You reached out for my hand
and I smiled at your joy.

You visited every day to check on
mama cat and her tiny furballs
-three black and two calicos-
until we found them homes.
Then Maybelle left,
because she was never ours to keep.

You moved away.

And that is when I realized
it wasn’t both/and.

It was either/or.

We moved to Winston-Salem even though
we quit smoking over thirty years ago

it turns out RJR’s no longer top banana
now the Baptists keep the bearded

Jesus highly competitive
and the economy based more

on doughnuts than naughty tobacco plants
made southern cities glow a distinct culture

ya’ll god may frown on tobacco sugar
so the city fathers plan branching out

to the computer Dell’s church rising up
no doubt will aspire to a heaven here

in Winston life filled with prosperity
with demon speed of communication

hardly seems a renunciation’s in order
crape myrtles line the street and even if

my neighbors are not all Republicans
allowed a war necessary to stop

Saddam and that new wave of imports
the undocumented working Mexicans.

West 74 to Wytheville

One ridge rides another ridge
one guitar solo rides another

guitar solo riding both
raises a poignant question

of immense proportion
unsettled a sign painted

along the road pointed
to the Baptist church

what if god is salvation
sawed bones unaccounted

a bone one had better
not be taking for granted

one winter rides
another winter one

father rides another father
one forged check rides

another forged check
day begins essentially

some question some looking
for any answer to this power

we start to pay attention
to things that happen

things that might happen
one thought may ride another

thought one horse may ride
another horse one moment cross

another moment this morning
Wytheville is much farther than

I intend to go or any singing

Lament

The race against time is like the moon.
It comes and goes, pulls us in its tide,

illuminates us if we are too soon,
too late, a bloom out of season, a sad bride.

Whether we push on at all, a question
fathers bring to such mortality, our children,

years of holding up the world upon our shoulders,
till we may sleep free of dark, exiled fears.

And still we run and run and run.
And all the black holes we have faced head on,

and all the hard and hardened laughing we have done,
return to us our days, our nights, a dancing over oceans.

She sits on the toilet lid, Mother of Chaos,
Queen of the Nines
looking into her GE make-up
mirror

day, office, home, evening
each setting lights her face rich amber, antelope goddess curls
her eyelashes with the wind,
Her dark hair wrapped in electric storm
rollers
in a creamy slip she is brown pearl
nail polish.

Little Bee-Eater, songless bird, watches
from the doorway, Shazam/Isis t shirt pulled
over her knees, she settles her wings,
so she don’t get shooed
from the room that smells of hot
copper, and wild woman
blankets

Made up, Oya stands at her closet, one hand on
half moon hip, a tornado
of dresses rain down on her bed.
capricious deity picks a dress of lightning,
which incidentally, is the first one
she tried on.

She turns toward quiet feathers, points ceremonial
coat hangers at the rainbow
on the bed, and says,
“Hey Bebe, wanna do Mama a little favor?”

**

Mom’s House,  Dad’s House

The synagogue’s side temple has a rotary
fan that squats in the doorway blowing
kisses from God’s mole hole where He lives
in His singular,
singularity.

Mary reentered the workforce, weary
of His demands for total devotion.
She stands perfectly still while old ladies slide
dollars into the dented tin box
mounted near cerulean knees.

They push buttons, light electric
candles, the hum signals Mary, her mind on End-
of-the-Month-Red-Beans-&-Rice, to send up prayers
for Uncle Boo’s scheduled MRI ,
or poor Ernestine’s wild daughter.

Must Mary walk Jesus to Temple Shalom on Wednesdays
and alternate weekends?
Does she deliberately not pack clean robes because God
can damned well buy some extras
to keep at His own house?

Does God drive Jesus home hours too early
or late,
pull up to the curb at Sacred Heart and honk
his trumpet for Mary to come outside like common
Debris Blanc?

Or does it all work beautifully for them
like it never does for the rest of us?

and he drinks his cup of coffee—
black and bitter, scalding strong—
all alone in that dark living room
with his old friend Louis L’Amour.

he’s a home-grown red dirt rascal,
ornery wit and easy drawl.
he’s a good ole boy and a navy man;
a husband and a dad.

with the velvet voice of the preacher,
he lives a sermon of compassion.
he loves the great state of Oklahoma,
his dog, his garden, his grandkids.

he is southern charm personified—
John Wayne swagger, winsome grin.
he is rough-edged cowboy romance
whistling soft and sweet and tired.

he’s wild horses, granite mountains;
scent of coffee and cologne.
he is gold-rush eyes and fiddlin’ tunes—
my orange blossom special.

**

Dime Store Deliverance

I walked to the church ‘cause the martyrs were callin’
in the kerosene grimace of Thursday afternoon
I’d been draggin’ that guilt like a gangrene appendage
I said “we all got problems, so what’s it to you?”
but the rain kept on pourin’ and my faith came at discount
left me clingin’ to second-hand miracles and booze
so I asked him if he’d ever heard of a fresh start
he said “forgiveness is for those with somethin’ to lose”

Joe’s voice is like a bird’s—his first remark
or laugh can crack the air like lightning through
a tree trunk, splitting it to slivers as
you snap your head around to find the sound.
And then his other words will follow, rise
and fall in intonations growing slow
and thick like old Virginia Creeper, but
melodic like a warbler, sentences
in short and calculated series ’til
his song and point are made and then he stops
and then you wonder if you heard the sound
at all because you keep on hearing when
it’s gone.

I drink his dialect when it grows cold
in Shenandoah County and he tells
me of his gun-shy foxhound, King, that years
ago his pa had shot atop the ridge
when he discovered King would never bound
to him with bloodied duck or squirrel in mouth;
instead the pup would dash off desperately,
attempting to escape the startling boom
of buckshot blast. A hunt dog hunts; it’s not
his place to run.

You couldn’t find two folks more different, two
whose lives have less in common, but I take
each word he offers me like coins or stamps
for a collection, building over time
to form an archive that could fills the halls
of the Smithsonian. There’s no one else
for him to pass them to, and all those words
will likely hover in my mouth and let
my tongue encircle them and change its shape
to match their drawl, and they will likely stay
there. Who on earth would I then pass them to?
But I can take them out from time to time
and polish them and marvel at them, put
them back away again for only me
to taste.

I would have liked to meet his pa. I draw
sharp pictures of the man I’ll never see,
whose life’s related over growing fires
we light each evening, both of us outside
and sipping on cigar smoke, drinking up
the heat that rises from the applejack
that sits inside the metal belly of
a thermos cap.

There’s something I can’t shake about the man
who climbed a hundred feet from branch to branch
without a glance back down the trunk. He’d scale
the tree to steal the baby crows from out
their nests and tie their feet together, whip
them all in three quick strokes. ’Cause crows can count
and three means babies are in trouble, so
the crows would rise from out the cornfields they
were ravaging, and he could shoot no less
than thirty-two of them. But who, upon
the sight he witnessed of his two young boys
commit a murder, slinging rocks that sailed
way upwards into sky then crushed a song-
bird’s head,

walked up to them, his visage calm and crisp
and haloed by the sinking sky behind
him, and then shot out, “Boy, you gimme that,”
and guarded “that” ’til dinner. Something in
his gait as he then rose from up the chair
he sat in at the table, grasped the sling-
shot—hours of boyhood labor over tire
and leather—and, in one swift move, released
it into flames inside the stove because
you never shoot a songbird, that, now close
to seven decades later, makes his son’s
voice echo slightly with the treble of
the one he killed.

**

To the Coyote on the Side of the Interstate

The valley aches because it stretches,
every day, from when the first damp breath
starts breaking through the filmy light that’s pancaked
on its follicles, and trembling stalks
start running on that exhalation, reach
and run until they burn and blacken in
the end because they realize that there’s nowhere
else but fields to run for miles and miles.

And there you are, your skin splayed out across
the valley’s asphalt scar, the road a stage
on which what must have been a wild ballet
is frozen, limbs stuck reaching desperately
to touch each corner of the earth at once.

It seems that someone tried to weave your body
all across the plain, to cut you right on down
your torso and unravel you like ribbon,
boundless, separated from your spool.
Your face, intact, looks miniscule against
your eighteen feet of large intestine,
football fields of skin. The rest of you
resembles something massive—antelope,
or elephant, but never anything
that would succumb to domination by
a balding tire brigade.
And yet, you weren’t
always like that, were you?  I can tell,
just yesterday you had a body tightly
molded, all your joints like springs, your eyes
wide open as your head would hover just
one note above the water. You were small
enough to plunge your sucker-punching hot
crescendo down without a splash, your head
submerged, a rock amidst the water rushed
downstream in whitecaps past your head to die.
And you would drink before the larger waters
snaking through the midlands to the coast
would swallow it and it would fade out, perfect,
syncopated, just as it was made
to, into the Atlantic’s closing notes.

And then one day the world is left to find
you: lying there in such bizarre attire,
appearing as you never did in life,
your body baking in the Mighty Oven
of the South, atop a patch of grass
eleven miles from C.J.’s BBQ.
I guess the rest of us could not have known
what aching brought you to the road, how deep
it ran, how far the whole of you could stretch.