Month: April 2016

 

When I first met Frank,

squashed pumpkin head atop a suit,

he squinted, asked me if I was in pain.

 

Not like I was, I said.

 

We shook hands.

Well, boy, you’re in the right place.

And he patted me on the back

 

like I had come home.

 

She was 86 the day we sat in the kitchen

that smelled of ghosts, bread crumbs, and old tea.

She held the newspaper over the table,

“Look at that nigger girl.

Isn’t she pretty?”

 

Outside, spring threw bolts of green against the windows.

But the kitchen was dim, as always;

the drawers around us bulged with rubber bands,

old bolts, nuts, and screws.

 

That day, she put burned toast

out the kitchen door,

“The birds will be happy;

they don’t get much from me.”

 

She went to the home at 88—

$60,000 in the bank

and old notes worth some more:

burnt toast-rubber band-bolt-nut-screw money.

 

At her funeral, Ione, 97 too,

said grandma was the prettiest,

kindest woman she ever knew,

a good friend, generous,

always devoted to others.

 

I cupped Ione’s cheek

and remembered that newspaper photo.

We lit a candle, “a prayer to the Virgin,” Ione said.

I stared up at the ivory marble statue,

felt the soft warmth that radiated

from Ione’s coffee-colored skin.

The flanks of Kennesaw Mountain sparkle—

ground baptized with blood

of fertile young men with minds

blank as new tablets.

 

Harker and McCook,

Vaughan and Cheatem,

like all generals and men

who send children to war,

wander wildernesses, marked;

the ground above their graves barren.

 

In the night, dust lifts beneath the feet

of Slaves and Soldiers, dancing sons

and daughters of mothers

no longer weary.

the widow pushes her cart

out of the grocery,

lifts her face to the gray

as the rain begins

and listens to the sigh

rush through the city

William Francis Bauer

says he knows things he learned

in ports foreign and domestic

catholic boys aren’t supposed to know.

 

And being a sinner, he kneels,

eyes to heaven, and repents

for scourging children with rosary beads.

 

Falling asleep in his chair now,

he mutters about whores in San Diego,

oriental women folded in silks.

 

Men jump from the destroyer deck,

gulls smoked above.

Sharks flitter in PT boat wakes.

His children float through spires and pipes

of the Grand Canyon.

Spacemen bound across mushroom clouds.

Marie, Marie.

 

His glasses teeter on ears waving

out from laurel hair wrapped

about his sun-flecked pate—

slight sheen of oil, light fuzz, warm, taut skin—

so small for all of him.

rose of sharon

raises head to heaven

and morning glory

trumpets to honeybees

 

below, eyes flick under eyelids,

cats dance in your sleep

out there, under redfire gold and lupine blue,

a boy’s just run up a prairie hill—dew heavy shoes,

grasshopper in hand spitting brown and kicking—

and smelled wind from the west

heavy with soil and wheat,

combine diesel and pickup truck smoke

 

homeward, he watches storms curtain sunsets

from the highway overpass,

waits for thunder to shake the ground

 

waking, he’s swept away in dark current,

bumps over rocks at the bottom of the river

 

Its bloated innards set before my house—

bundles of such import,

even dogs gather once a week to see.

Just yesterday, Grace, the next door neighbor,

puffed into the sky on fish-gill coat arms.

About evening orange, she drifted back

and snaked a blue balloon up the radio mast

to beam into space on light shards.

 

Today, Grace little-old-ladied her way

to the grocery store, then hup-hup-hupped

to the shade of the elm.

 

She was last seen somewhere

between owl hungry and Coahuila purple,

trout levitating up the sidewalk,

waving to the children

on their way home from school.

 

groundhogs waddle in moon shadow

on the fringe of the meadow

where ghosts of old farmers

assay the dirt, ponder the crop

 

planets rise from treetops

the sun pulls up from a fold in the karst

a round of songs lifts into the dawn

echoes down the ravines

 

in a tent in the wildflowers

the ornithologist dreams

of cataloging species