NEW MEXICO BOOTHEEL: A TRIPTYCH 1. Between Cloverdale and Antelope Wells Bleak, alien, hostile and unaccommodating are its only adjectives; its scattered, brittle trees ideal for the roosts of vultures. Even the rain, scarce as a blessing, is violent, flash flooding gulch, draw
then sizzling into steam like drops on a red- What’s not rock is red earth hard as horseshoes, a gentle rise of desert so rare it’s relief. Only thorns endure, dead or alive, much more practical than prayers. 2. Dead Horse Gulch Ranch Beauty here is hardscrabble, here where hawks perched on posts of mesquite constitute the only filigree. Nights, the hides of calves twitch, branded with irons of crude stars wobbling in blackness, raw to the firmament as a cowhand’s flesh in an ice storm, laid wide- by a barb of twisted wire. 3. Chihuahuan Desert Night Mojave rattlers slither to the blacktop, still rattles, and flatten to sponge asphalt sun. Like molten amber, the scorpions ooze from stones and sidle beneath the shadows of stingers. Emerging pad by pad from his den, with but his wide- open eyes, the puma bejewels the darkness. (Winner, 2023 Spur Award/Western Writers of America; first published in the San Pedro River Review) |
Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas) Intrigued with the silver aspect of Texas light, the architect* abhorred skylights and clerestory
windows. Natural light enters through a two- and- at the apex of vaulted ceilings; strikes convex, perforated aluminum; reflects onto curved concrete; ricochets off walls of travertine and the warmth of an oak floor; merges with light from incandescent lamps; and illumes, as if its oils were still wet with freshness and glowing from within, La Tour’s masterpiece**,
leaving the viewer complicit in the dazzling trinity of the cheat, the servant, and the courtesan. * Louis Kahn ** The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (from Art Museums; first published in DIN Magazine) |
Munificence (the goatherd muses) Their udders house miracles of milk, butter, and cheese. Their dung is my fuel; their flesh my seldom meat. Their skins clothe me. With their bones, I make
my simple tools. Their horns are spoons; symbols of plenty. The walls of their bowels, sliced thinly into strips,
serve as sutures; string cellos, violins. (from The Goatherd; first published by Bunchgrass Press) |
Tide Pool Touch Tank for Frank The dank air of the Maine State Aquarium is pungent with brine and the nostril- smell of fresh fish.
Little children huddle around a tank like primitives in a ritual. Their heads swim with flashbacks
of moonless, blue- of luminous bodies sparkling through the slats of their cribs beside the windows,
ever beyond the reach of their fat, groping fingers. Wide- by the miracle beneath them, they take deep breaths,
ease their hands into the black- green holiness of seawater, and, with the fingers of gods trembling in the heavens, stroke the spiny skin of stars. (from The Lobsterman’s Dream: Poems of the Coast of Maine; first published in The Texas Review) |
Geraniums He and his mother worked all afternoon potting the new plants, and placing them all around the house. As Ernest sleeps with the little clods of fresh potting soil caked under his nails, his big fingers move working the dark earth of his dreams. He smiles in his sleep at the fat buds splitting into bloom as each hairy stem twists through thick clusters of deep green leaves, and lifts to the night its choir of fresh blood. (from Uncle Ernest) |
House Finch in Summer Through my office window, I watched it for several hours darting from its perch in the holly tree, and then, within minutes, returning.
The tree stood just a few feet from the doors of the art museum. Each time a door was opened, a blast of air- rushed out, ruffling the ruby plumage of its head and breast. It just closed its eyes, braced itself on its branch, and froze. All day long it did this, never tiring of its antics, as if relishing the air redolent and tumescent with the oils of the masters; laden with the bated, exhaled breath of astonishment. (from A Murder of Crows; first published in The Christian Science Monitor) |
The Red Raging Waters For weeks on end it has rained in Texas Sending the Brazos miles beyond its banks Where it rises even now under dark Texas skies Over the wooden floor of a bottomland Baptist church, Floating creaking pews shaped with the aching buttocks Of generations, the wild Brazos rising higher yet To the stained- Soaking the feet of Jesus and lapping the elbows Of His uplifted arms, creeping up the pulpit On whose open Bible coils a fat diamondback, The red raging waters of the Brazos Bringing to sweet communion the serpent and the saint. (from Amazing Grace; first published in The Texas Review) |
The Slough The decaying pine boards of his porch creak beneath the rockers of stained oak shaped by the hands of his father. He kills his time there, rocking, staring deep into the woods of his grandfather, toward the slough. For ten years, since he turned seventy, it’s risen in the basement of his dreams. The haven of gator and cottonmouth, it’s harbored for three generations his clan’s deepest secrets. Late at night, if he listens hard enough, he can hear the muffled, steady engine of its rot. It works its timeless wonders under still, dark waters. Its film has already claimed his pale, blue eyes. (from The Woodlanders; first published in Louisiana Literature) |
Out of the Blue But for the three of us, the park that day was deserted. Mom meant no harm and said she was just kidding when, out of the blue, she sped off in the Buick and left me and my little brother stranded on the blanket we’d spread for a picnic. Beyond the elm- of Cole Park, in far West Texas, the flat red earth ran unobstructed for miles in all four directions all the way to the horizon. Sam clutched his teddy bear and started crying. I stood in my white, suspendered shorts and watched the car dissolve in a cloud of dust. A few minutes later, when she drove back, I was still standing, too shocked to speak or cry, dispossessed at three of my trust, held against her heaving chest weightless as the husk of a cicada. (from Where Skulls Speak Wind; first published in The San Antonio Current) |
Driving Through West Texas Locked for an hour on cruise control without meeting another vehicle, I’m hypnotized by yellow stripes, whizzing by like arrows. Sixty miles back, I missed the sign posted by a Mobil Hopper would’ve liked, the last gas stop for the next hundred miles. The wind howls through my cracked window. Though moonless, the night reminds me of the set of an old Frankenstein flick, flaring with hundreds of torches. The Day- needle of my gas gauge quivers, almost horizontal. I swerve to miss a diamondback slithering across the macadam. For no clear reason, I say aloud the word diamondback. It startles me, not so much the word itself but the intimacy with which I utter it, as if it were the name of a friend. (from Stark Beauty) |
The Initiate Through mirrored, dark sunglasses he sees the stars clustered in the fraternity of oblivion. He lies beside his brethren in the open air, the night air of moonlight and the breath of sleeping crows. His body still trembles with the hushed terror of the vow. In the freezing chrome of Harleys, millions of stars burn bright, ceremonial candles. (from The Fraternity of Oblivion) |
French Quarter Below sea level, in night fog thick as chicken and sausage gumbo, it looms, this whole place a brick and concrete grave adorned with Spanish and French iron, a grisly Easter basket wrapped in alternating bands of green, gold, and purple cellophane under which flicker the lights, the ghastly lights of gas lamps and neon every hue of the rainbow illuming the ghostly faces of voodooienne Marie Laveau and the Saint Louis Cathedral sticking its spires into night sky like pins in a doll of voodoo, voodoo whose rhythmic chants gave birth to jazz in this glittering city of sin and Lent forever gently nudged by the giant python of the Mississippi, triumphant, tumescent, and shining from its meal of mice and men. (from New and Selected Poems; first published in Small Pond) |
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Poems