Blackberry Winter

Rolling cold and winds barbed with ice
Whip the new plants, prickle the birds.
The flowers sulk, hiding their faces,
Timid in winds too cold for May.
Alone with my thoughts,
The bitter sweep of cold days
Roll like waves over me.
Yesterday, my young neighbor said
“Just a little cold spell, you know,
What they used to call
Blackberry Winter.”

Used to be Blackberry Winter,
When the trees bowed in dark winds
Like fingers of old ghosts,
When signs were read
Like cast bones, only they read
The call of the night birds,
The upturned faces of morning glories,
The new shoots of green
Dappling red fields with light-
What the older ones called
Blackberry Winter—
The fear that light and sun
Would fade away, cutting
Blooming flowers and greening pastures,
A slow fade into dark.

As the light goes low
Over the fenced row,
The cold closing of day—
I turn to home and pray
For sun and warm weather.

Morning at the Window

Along the torn edges of the mountains,
The morning breaks gray, misty,
Like the torn edges of newspaper,
Blowing down the street,
Despondent.

Angry winds toss among the trees
Shedding water in great sprays
The movement of rain echoes
On the glass, patterns of light and dark.

I turn from the morning window,
Dark outside mirrors dark inside me-
Seeking some comfort in kinship—
And then she walks in
Resplendent.

She only passes me, a slight brush
That flashes, speed of light,
Lifts my head, shivers like ice
And I forget entirely of
Darkness.

Aunt Rena

Aunt Rena was a simple woman,
Kept garden rows tall in the sun,
Precise like hedges,
Tablecloths swept and tucked
Like snow in corners,
Her parlor with shelves of figures
Arranged in formation,
Her bedroom, cold, silent,
No men’s shoes or coats
Tossed idly on a chair,
Laying in wait like vagrant.
No, Aunt Rena was simple—
We’d sit there in the dimming light
Honeysuckle and cricket song
Drifting like smoke in dreams,
She’d hum a simple song and
Rock a simple melody in her creaky chair,
And sometimes, sometimes,
When the night closed in with jasmine,
She’d hold that men’s handkerchief to her face,
And smile while color spread up her face
Like the climbing flowers on her porch.

Farm Life

We started the planting of seasons,
Fresh turned sod thrown like spilled blood
To the sun.
The green shoots threw leaves up like prayers
And we considered ourselves lucky.
While the sun and sky shifted and moved,
Shifted and moved, we worked, worked,
While the sweat slid off our backs
And dirt caressed our faces,
We laughed:
This was good work, we were connected
Like vines to the earth,
Growing, thriving, blessed.
We laughed at those landless,
Working cut off from good earth,
Lifeless, walking listless
Over earth they could not feel.
Then the floods came,
Turning our fields into mirrors
Reflecting bleak skies like
Barren granite stone.
We stopped laughing.

Brother Dennis

Sunday morning, the sounds of his voice
Crashing like waves across the pews,
We are hurled back, thrown in the winds
Of sin, fire, redemption, blood-
His words creep up our backs,
Bind our hands, hold our necks,
So we dare not look away,
We dare not turn,
We are all sinners, all unwashed, all hell-bound,
All squared away.
Later, we talk about how much of a saint he is,
Over fried chicken and cold potato salad,
His words sustain us like bread,
Fill us with vapor like wine,
While he, Brother Dennis, he
Sits on the old bench under the oaks,
Sweat slicking his forehead like grease,
Tongue wetting his parched lips,
With one hand probing his pants pocket,
And watches the young boys play.

Down By the River

We followed him through the woods,
Limbs tearing like fingers, while birds wheeled
Crying ragged cries like funeral cloth.
We followed him across the train yards,
Where metal screamed like crying wolves.
For what he’d done to that girl,
We’d follow forever, like an old curse,
Violence begat violence
Like the old book said.
We followed him all the way to the river,
But there we stopped,
For the coal barges, sliding like dark ghosts
Had only left a red smear in the water,
Rippling like red hair in the sun.
We stopped, and watched the blood run
While the dark barges banged together,
A dark song in time with our hearts.

Summer Night

We shake off the evening dampness like fleas,
Sunlight drags through humid twilight,
The weight of the day hangs like willows,
Us, the boys of summer, shining like fire
But covered in sweat and dirt,
Putting up hay in lofts that breathe
Like hot ovens, swollen with coal.
Sitting outside while the mosquitoes hum
And crickets sing over dark hollers,
A tune that haunts our minds,
Echoes in our hearts.
Inside the house, the television blares
A Yankees game, two outs, bottom of the ninth,
“Here they go!” we hear, but we don’t go anywhere,
While our fathers guzzle another beer and
Cigarettes stab the darkness inside,
Our mothers’ voices sing a slow song
From the kitchen that fades away like time.
The slow creep of darkness settles
Over another Kentucky summer night while
We vibrate like stars on the back porch.

On Sunday

On Sunday, Memaw played slow waltzes,
Old Charlie Pride records,
Music that shuffled with slowness,
Music that reflected like water.

On Sunday, Memaw picked her flowers,
Red clematis, white hyacinth,
Sat lilies in the windows like sentinels,
Pinned a rose to her dress like a soldier’s medal.

On Sunday, Memaw draped her quilt on the couch,
Red, white and blue, like a flag flickering in shadows,
Touched that one patch of dress blue,
Smiled a smile that seemed somewhere else.

On Sunday, Memaw lived in three quarter time,
Touched her face to the quilt and sat alone,
There was thunder from the low valley like guns,
That echoed through the slow drip of silence.

Churchyard, Sunday Morning, Storm Coming

The whitewashed church is filled, ripe,
It’s boards breathing with every word,
Words rise like feathers, sway in winds,
The end is nigh, the wait is over,
The congregation swells with joy,
Pregnant with expectation.
Outside, stillness sweeps the churchyard,
No wind makes patterns of the leaves,
No passing touch marks the flowers,
Thunder rumbles like sermons falling,
While stillness creeps
Like the sweep of darkness.
Cold rain drops on the gravestones,
Falling like dark wine,
Mixing memory and desire
While the dead sleep,
Aware there is still much waiting to come.

The Courtyard

Evening, in the shadow of the church,
Alone in the courtyard, there she sits,
Every evening for twenty years,
Each day falling like petals
She drops in the dark pool,
White floating over dark waters
Like memory reflected.
Her hair, touched gray by age,
Frames her smooth neck,
Slides like the rustle of dark silk
As she stirs the water, waiting,
The ripples rolling like rains
Across grass, moving like
She did when he moved, then.
Later, the bench is empty,
The moon crosses the pool in silence,
The stone where she sits shadowed
Like a scar.

Orpheum

Downtown, the sidewalk glitters in the sun,
Midday moves to afternoon,
Shadows shift like strangers
Over empty buildings and alleys.
That old building, with windows boarded
Like scars,
Is the old Orpheum Theater,
Where black and white movies shone
Over laughing people, red drapes,
Velvet, twenty-five cent beers,
The night swollen with desire,
Fragrant with blooming flowers
Shifting in the darkness like smoke.
Today, the building stands dark, void,
It’s gift barren.
The sidewalk shifts in the sun
Like a ragged cut
As the southern sun
Moves to sunset.

July Evenings

Grandpa moved with specific wisdom,
Even a boy could see,
Each step a purpose, each movement
Prescribed, like a carpenter
Lays out the wooden frame.
Hot July, when the sun flickered
Around us like flames,
When birds dropped low in the sky,
When shadows hummed with crickets,
We’d sit, he’d smoke that old pipe,
The smoke wafting with his words
Like the oldest songs,
The ones we remember
Without remembering, like the bird
Flies without trying.
He’d talk the shadows from the sun,
Until the day moved with evening,
The night called with honeysuckle,
Then he’d touch that wedding band,
Carved on his finger like runes,
And say, “I’ve got to get home son.”

Old Man Johnson

The promise of rain sweeps across the fields,
Wind dances atop the fescue,
Still he stoops and hoes, stoops and hoes,
Across the field like a machine.
Thirty five years have taught him
Sometimes rain comes, sometimes not.
Once there was the promise of money,
Green running into green.
Once there was the girl he loved,
Her bare feet delicious in the dirt,
Running ahead like a filly,
Long legs sugar brown in the sun.
Now he stoops and hoes,
As he furrows down the handle of the hoe,
All he knows at the end,
Is everything crumbles into dust,
And there is only he, alone,
With prayers flitting like wheeling birds
As thunder rolls across the valley.

Burley

Tobacco will kill you, that’s for sure—
But in Kentucky, green leaves thrust into the sun
Are both life and death-
Rows of long leaved burley planted
Like offerings to some dark god,
Dripping from the rain,
Shadows in mist like some
Dark witch calling,
“Come to me, my Kentucky child.”
I would never smoke, I said-
My father smokes,
My mother smokes,
My family smokes,
Everyone I grew up with smoked.
They weaved some magic spell
With burning ends,
Punctured the night with their cigarettes,,
Spoke around plumes of smoke,
Worked down long rows of tobacco
In heat that moved like snakes.
I would never smoke.
Today, I light my pipe,
Listen to the sizzle of the tobacco
And hear the voice calling
From some dark Kentucky hollow.

Down the Road

Down the road, there’s the hollow remains
Of once a country store, porch fallen,
Windows dark like some moonless night,
Door yawning with unanswered questions.

Down the road, there’s a little girl
Who spends days playing with dirty dolls,
Laughing at coal trucks rolling like dirty gods
While her daddy works two shifts,

Down the road, there’s a meth house,
Where people shift like coyotes,
Scratch their arms with ragged claws,
Sit shirtless in the dirty sun.

Down the road, there’s a mansion,
Where windows glimmer like diamonds,
While across the road an old man, bent with age
Cooks food in a one room shack.

Down the road, there’s a small church,
People send prayers into the skies like pennants,
Sunday morning silence drips like dew
As the day moves along as always.

Solitary Molly

For years, she turned the men away like dogs,
Feared their noises, their sultry talk,
Their smells riding the river like night
Their taste hanging low in the air like coal dust.

She focused on simple things, the flowers like stars,
The clean church with simple lines, straight like heaven,
She walked in the woods, where birds sang in dark trees,
Where the branches hang down like the hems of dresses.

She spoke often of grace, how women were graceful,
(Men most assuredly were not graceful)
But the church was empty, echoed of broken shadows,
Even light is not complete without dark-

Today, the man brought her one long stemmed rose,
Her face quickening with color like the lifting of dresses,
She smelled his cologne, traced the exquisite stem with her finger,
A simple grace, but grace nonetheless.

Communion

The earth dances, down dark hollers,
And shouts off distant tops, a hymn we sing
Filled with mountain laurel, bones of man,
Rocks with old voices like water.

It is good to walk these hills, my friends,
My kin, my bones move with your bones,
My blood dark as your blood,
My laughter meets your winds as one.

Underneath, dark coal sits with another voice,
It does not rest, it calls, with dark teeth and tongue,
A siren’s call, Odysseus knew it,
A darkness where no light goes.

I walk these hills, they move me like music,
A music that moves like water, whispers like mist.
A distant mine throws a flicker of thunder my way,
And I know nothing sacred will stay.

In the Low Country

In the low country, there is a gas station,
In and out we go, like moths, or ants,
Stop and talk for a while, the heat mixed with gas,
Cigarette smoke moving low like fog.
In the low country, there is music on Saturday night,
Beer and moonshine lift us, we move,
Guitars dance in the smoky light
Lips move like whispers of darkness.
In the low country, Sunday silence comes,
Churches echo with sound of prayer,
The cross sits solemn, a thousand words in silence,
We repent, then move like a river home.
In the low country, Monday comes,
Two men fight in the hot sun,
A blind man moves down the street,
Tapping his cane like laughter dying.

Black Holes

There are black holes, where all light goes,
Nothing returns, so they say,
Even light can’t find a way out,
Where everything is bent around the edges.

Today, a little boy played with old tires,
Outside an old bus, rusted,
In the yard, an old car sat, silent,
Torn clothes flapped like a banner on a clothesline.

Yesterday, an old woman slept, alone,
Her breath shallow in an old bed,
In the shadow of a mountain she moves,
Gathering water in a rusted can.

There are black holes, where all light goes,
Nothing returns, so they say.

Kentucky Summer

July, Kentucky woods,
We eat the nectar from honeysuckle,
The yellow and white blooms like stars,
Dancing in the fenced row.
Dad showed me, when I was a kid,
Now I show my own child,
His smile wide like the wide skies,
His laugh loud and good.

I looked for days, to find the words that count,
Where are the words to find heaven?
What is the darkness without light,
Why read without hope?
I thought they had gone,
Like the passing of spring,
Leaving nothing behind,
A mess of broken images,
Like an empty nest in
The tall oaks,
Then I thought of you, my Kentucky home.

Sing one song of my old Kentucky home,
I will sing of several, for that is me.
I am my grandmother, singing in the garden,
Dirt sifting around her bare feet,
Curling in the shifting sunlight,
Making vines grow tall in the sun,
Weaving a magic spell that binds
Kentucky sun and sky into fruit.

I am my father, walking the woods,
Cutting the trees, the good wood smell,
While limbs wove a cross above him,
And water moved with voices
In a running spring through the woods,
While we drank from the water,
Darkened by shadows like wine,
Listening to a song
Dark and old like the oldest trees.

I am my mother, picking blackberries,
Fingers stained like blood,
To make jelly, summer in a jar,
To take one season and weave a spell,
Make winter sing with the voice of summer,

I am all these, and I am more.
When summer fell again, crushing spring
In humid nights, the words came back,
In a spray of honeysuckle like stained glass,
In summer wine like blood,
In sprays of blowing grass in storms,
The words came, and I laughed.

We walk together, my wife and child and I,
Three in the dampening summer heat,
Stopping to look at Queen Anne’s,
Spidered in the twilight,
Watching the sunset shimmer
Down my wife’s hair like rainbows,
Our laughter circles in the dusk,
Rises like sparrows into the sky.
Voices rise in the deepening dusk,
My memaw, singing of magic,
My father, talking of wood,
My mother, with the voice of blackberries,
And ours, my wife and child,
Speaking together in a Kentucky song
And all the words count.