Your Grandfather’s Death

August and mourning your grandfather’s death
we drove through the dry heat like dowsers
searching back road after back road for hours
for wild roadside strawberries, their cool breath.

Darkness and oncoming headlights, a sharp turn,
the arc of my curled palm on your strong thigh
and a small thunder of clouds in the August sky.
We were in love, a forest needing a match to burn.

The car closed in on us, weaved into our lane
slow like a dentist’s needle into a sore gum.
The last thing I recall is the driver’s right thumb
raised to us in the quick glare of light, then pain.

When I woke on the emergency room gurney
you held my sweaty and trembling hand
bent on showing how the bandage fanned
on your arm, my partner in this sad journey.

“My grandfather’s dead,” you said, and sighed,
put your head on my sore shoulder and cried sweet
tears as they shaved my tender scalp dry and neat
for stitches, while my heart stuttered for you and died.

**

The Electric Fence

Some say this is a rural legend.
There’s a field of three boys
one younger, two older
facing the Holsteins across a single
wire stretched hip-high, twisted taut
around a white spool nailed
to a rough-grained wooden fence post.
You can see what’s coming, no?
Look among you, ladies, for the man
rubbing his thigh. He really wants
to grab himself and gurgle his pain
like the slit-throat cat these boys left behind
an hour past but he can’t, the way he
would if he were among only men,
where they bond over killings,
warm blood on their hands.
Don’t worry though.
The youngest of these boys, when
forced on his face in a dirty mattress
later on by the other two boys,
will forget the bloody cat and only
remember the way they said go ahead
I dare you. Whip it out and piss on that wire.
It feels good. And how he did.

**

This Poem is About _____________

You tell me stories at bars
where we sit outside under
the bug-haloed streetlights
and watch as women of all
ages walk past and though
you are happily married
and I am happily married,
we are happily married yet
the story is interrupted at
every turn when a woman
walks by and though we are
the type of men whom women
appreciate that is to say not outright
sexist our eyes wander,
stories stop and I wonder which of us
is undressing the women in our minds
or which is feeling the quick snap
of guilt and how that ought to affect
us as we sit at this bar outside
with our drinks and conversation,
how biology dictates somehow that
no matter what we are discussing
when we see a certain length
of ankle or bare shoulder
we are suddenly rooting around
with our limbic brains and at least one
of us wonders how much pleasure
we should take in the act of look-
ing and how quickly we should adapt
before a woman sees us seeing,
before someone sees that all talking
and stories have stopped and calls
us on our shit.

**

Summer, Shelling Peas

There are old ladies all along
this stretch of road shelling peas
into plastic buckets in the late
five ‘o’clock heat and you sit on
this porch in a lawn chair with one
your cutoff jeans and halter top
out of place horribly
in the chaff-dust day
the peas like tiny hearts
in your hand. You roll them out
of the pod with your thumb
and they tinkle like rain
into the bucket. We drink
iced tea and eat chips
as the last strains of daylight
fall. We play euchre under
the bug-zapper at the picnic table
and later that night I take
your thumb into my mouth
and taste you,
and the good earth.

**

How it Begins

The way the half moon of your thumbnail shines
in the light from the pole as you pick at the label
from a bottle of imported beer makes me think
of staring down a river in a hot twilight of inner
tubes with a cooler full of it and nowhere to go.

It’s the kind of night when the trickle of water
from the barn spigot has turned the ground
into a slick pit of mud. You put the bottle
down and dangle your tiny painted toes into
the mess. I’m still thinking of a river but you’ve

already passed me by in the moment when a barn
owl sounds his call and slow-fades into the woods
like an echo searching for its source while
you slow-dance in place, twist your feet into the mud.
And your hips sway. In counterpoint to my heart,

the sudden snap-sting of mosquitoes or the low roar
of the occasional car. Scent of that water on grass
and turning to mud. The long muscles at the backs
of your thighs. Your hands under the spigot for
a palm of water to drink. Inside the barn you can

hear the cows shuffle their hooves like men plodding
toward a job in the near-dawn solace, fading dark.
No river could flow as quickly as the low-volt connection
of this beginning like the way fishermen know the trout
will run: it’s in their nature and it’s a scent in the air both,

how every hour the moon sinks is another debt the night
must pay to the people who are still awake and following
their bone-desire to be more than what they are, to feel
in the certain grasp of a hand the flighty allure and stray
pheromonal pull of woman to man and dark to night,

the long laughing pull of foreign bodies each to the other.