This from Boulevard, 2000

Appalachian Gothic

In early fall, my walnut tree turns brown,

when, despite the season’s fanfare, its leaves

curl-up and shed. In just three weeks, the limbs

are bare, the sidewalk draped in drab confetti

children shuffle through on their way to school.                                            

And all around, yellow birch and maple

festoon the hills with gaud and decoupage 

the roads in rain-glazed scraps of gold and red

lapped in jigsaw patterns. Then day by day,

the light distills a blue so bright it burns

my eyes and graphs the walnut’s screen of stems

into a tracery that holds the sky

like bits of glass, no two alike, a globe

within a globe and made from what we breathe.

This from Southern Review (2007?)

Easter Freeze

The resurrection was a bust this year:

dirty weather, sneak-thief wind, dogwoods stripped

of leaf, the daylight stretched like soiled silk.

So she put by her white shoes and sheer skirt,

her pastel blouse and breezy reveries,

to wrap herself in lamb’s wool, then stood 

inside the open door and looked down

the frost-slicked streets she would have to drive

to hear again how the observant woman

kept death’s offices, but found the tomb-rock

rolled aside; and how the death den kept

no scent of death, nothing but dank air

and gore-stained grave clothes, strewn—

her vials and verses, useless; how she told

then showed the baffled men; how they looked

and left her there, alone.  And how she wept 

until her name was called, and so set forth.

This from Sow's Ear Poetry Review, (2002?)

Directions to a Ruin

Follow Spoon Gap Road past the Free Will Church

and find a wide-hipped chimney stub

girdled with a snarl of berries, dark and sweet

this time of year, rooted in the fireplace,

blacksmithed pot-hook curled like a come-here finger,

but the house is gone.  Lightning burned it down,

the crooked stroke still scarred across the hearth.

In easy view from where a doorway

might have been, several generations lie

beneath a hill toothed with snaggled headstones

tilted by a hundred years of freeze and thaw

where love’s observance long ago succumbed

to underbrush and new-growth oak and grief’s

alphabet weathered to a palimpsest

on lichen freckled slates. You might rest there,

stretch out in the chimney shade and taste

the wild blackberries, slightly tart with ash.

This from Nebraska Review (1996)

Rainstorm

The Lord sits enthroned above the flood.  “Psalm 29"                                                  

for Glen Vecchione

Lost in rural Georgia, we did Jesus

one better and drove on water,

hydroplaning gully-washers

churned up by mid-summer heat.

The Caddy shimmied in the curves

and fish-tailed down the straights,                                                         

past red clay archipelagoes

of tenant shacks and trailer-parks

rinsed opal in the shifting squalls.

We lunched on RCs, Scooter Pies,

and watched the wipers skim

momentary half moon vistas

lush with peach and pecan groves

whipped by drenching scarves of wind

while gospel stations ghosted by

then crinkled into static shards.

and billboards asked if we were saved,

promised Hell if we were not. 

But the hootchy-koo Savannah 

kept low-country holy-rolling,

swinging through her tangled banks.

Shimmy, dear old Caddy, daddy’s car,

shake and roll, old rattling gospel–

the waters came, we skipped like calves

across the rich and sinful south.

This from Southern Poetry Review, (2003?)

The Sympathy of Dust

Her Hoover Vortex Master hums,

the house a diary of dross,

Pop-Tart crumbs, playground grit,

wicked grains of glass

the broom did not pick up

when her boyfriend broke

a long-neck Miller Beer,

fragments of a narrative

she tracks from room to room,

cobwebs, dead bees, scented talc,

pollen shed by Easter lilies

one week past their prime,

and later when she cannot sleep,

the nightscape fills with cosmic dust

she heard Carl Sagan talk about

on the old Tonight Show,

comet ash and star-chaff

settling on her sleeping son

and on the now remembered face

of the whiskey-crippled father

she tried not to love,

how it falls, the dust of genesis,

until she falls asleep at last.  

This from Rattle, 2012

Blue Plate Special

Pork chops, potatoes, beans, gravy, and grief,

seasoned to taste and shared by the dead girl’s

father and boyfriend, the table talk sparse,

the dead girl not much mentioned, especially

the dead part, or how she dumped the boyfriend

a week before she died. The boyfriend drank beer,

the father, iced tea. The boyfriend had plans,

the father did not. The brother came late

and skipped dinner (not hungry, he said),

went upstairs and cried (they seemed not to hear). 

Then he came back and cleaned up his plate.

Then they all had coffee, ice cream, and pie.

Then they looked through a box of old photos

and then said goodbye, over and over again.

This from Kenyon Review, 2005 (?)

Feeding the Fire

Down the chute the coal chunks come, black and brittle

from time’s press, packed with essence of dim forests, 

funk of flora, fungiforms, relics of the Paleozoic

destined for my furnace, fire-bellied Baal that warms

the innards of this house.

I toss the flame a shovel-load

and feel the blaze of opaque past transfigured into infrared,

then kick shut the furnace door and wipe the smudge

of pitch-black dust that seams the lifeline of my palm.  

This from Southern Review, 2007 (?)

ROCKET GIRL

for Beth and Lucy

Cindy Shepard—I remember—

gold hair, brown eyes, soft voice,

a smell like toast and apples,

what I ate each morning—

the classroom sweet with Cindy,

where, one day, when asked

our fathers’ occupations, Cindy said,

a spaceman, and suffered mocking

from her groundling classmates. 

But I stayed quiet, and on the bus

that circumsailed our orbit,

I told her I believed her, 

because I couldn’t in much else.

Years later, Commander Shepard

rode a Redstone into space,

and my own trajectory carried me

to distant schools, and Cindy became

Connie, Caroline, and Shiela,

became the smell of toast and apples

my daughter eats for breakfast, a moon

that wanders wider every year,

my gravity diminished, my orbit

more elliptic, the sun’s grip growing

weaker, stars more than ever kin,

as I drift closer, devoted spaceman,

to worlds where trees bear golden fruit

plucked by golden sisters.

This from Zone 3, 2011

Durable Goods

She knew the fridge and stove would outlast her,

washer and dryer, too.  And her car was good,

her son had said, for more miles than she’d ever drive.

So what to do with what lasts, like the four-post bed?

Well, that she hoped to die in, as her husband had,

ten years past.  But she’d made sure her will was clear—

who got what, not why.  Details wore her out. 

Some things last a good long while.  She would not.

“The body’s estate?” she said, “just stuff to stuff,

amen.  Burn it and be done.  Sell the house,  

divide the rest—and Joe, you can have the car,

but Susan gets the silver.  Give young Louanne   

the four-post bed now that she’s found a lover,

and dare her to wear it out, if she can.”

This from Southwest Review, fall 2012.

Reckoning

for Tom Bell

Time, a star, sextant, and chart will fix

your place on the ocean’s shifting page

while its transitive grammar slips unread

past hull and spars—the run-on syntax

of currents and winds, the tidal motifs

and punctuation of reefs and lee shores.

Sight the sun at noon and note the degree

of its height at the moment of its fall. 

Reckon your place, mark X on the chart, 

and there you are. Now plot your course

to virgin beaches you’ll never reach.

Turn from the wind, trim the blank sail,

watch it fill with the log of your voyage,

which will only reveal where you have been.