Poems

The Invitations

Come now out of those shadows, child,
Said a pin oak from the forest edge,
Step from behind that porch banister--
You have nothing but friends in the woods.

So my mind abandoned human homes.
It went to live with the undergrowth,
Ground squirrels, the skittish coyotes,
Feeding on rabbits and wild berries.

The stream said, our bodies are the same.
Where you curve, I curve to gather you.
The racer said, I will not outpace,
I will not strike a blow against you.

When snow fell, my mind shivered, burrowed
Into the flanks of cattle straddling
Scattered bales of timothy and rye--
My thoughts lived in the stalls of old barns.

The mockingbird sang, your dream, poor child,
Weighs no more than a fluted feather.
You will see the bright top-sides of clouds,
The west wind will deliver us home.

Johnson's Ground

We sit under the awning and watch them descend in unison.
A flock of thirty or more down through the heavy rain
We weren’t supposed to get, pecking where grass is thin
For what the moisture turns up.
They look like the sound of the word
Grackle, these scavengers with wings muted black as painted iron rails,
As wet tar, their empty beaks flashing a bright citrus smear.
Memorial Day weekend and the weather drives us for cover,
Beating down plastic flowers and darkening the family gravestones.

Each year we arrive, like any family, to admire new babies
And find out who has changed jobs or gotten married,
I come to see who’s left to sit in the shaded chairs
Where my grandmother sat with her oldest sister Minnie
For the last time, neither of them able to name the other,
But both staring as if into a clouded mirror.
In the memory of their faces
I see pillars of stone, pillars of stippled salt,
Where the hammer of time drives the chisel of living,
The opaque blue of their eyes, each pair reflecting the other,
Sky blue buttons threaded through a dark blue dress.

Homecoming at the cemetery: they never let us go, even the ones
Laid under before our births continue to make their claims,
To draw the interest on their spent lives.
My grandfather waits here,
A Houston buried in Johnson ground—such is the appointment
He made with them. He was dead two years before
I was born, but who do I remind the old people of?
Whose picture did I stare into above the living room fireplace?

My great-uncle Gene tells my father and me about the base
He served in Korea, how bombs sounded hitting the village,
While a hundred feet away is my cousin Gary,
killed in Vietnam, telling his story into our other ears,
into the soles of our shoes.
The foraging birds drag worms
Out of the ground; we pull dark meat from the bones
Of chicken thighs and split boiled potatoes with plastic forks.

Damp air hums in our lungs and old people begin
Covering dishes—the rain always seeps in,
Even under shelter.
I offer my hands one more time,
To the company who packs their leftovers and drives away,
And to the company who stays behind, under the tall grass,
Left in the restless turning of what we remember of them.

Elegy for a Hay Rake

To every thing its season, and to every tool
its final turn; to the Farmhand rake my father
bought hard-used in 1976, rust has eaten away
all your labels, all your sheen and simple function;
to what I hope is my last sight of you, unhitched
and standing in the field like a photograph
from the Great Depression;
farewell to the cut hay left
scattered on the ground to rot, nothing ate you
but the soil that birthed you; to the tractor tire
those long grappling points missed by inches
on every sharp turn, you survived without puncture;
to the long afternoon hours spent digging clumps
out of the balers’ clenched teeth, good money
cannot buy you back;
so long to the lucky machine,
lucky I won’t sell you as an antique, that no one will
paint you red, white, and blue and plant you in a garden,
or hang you on a restaurant wall; goodbye to the five
leaning wheels, their crooked tines turning, reaching up
like broken fingers to wave hello, hello, goodbye.

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Johnson's Ground﻿

Elegy for a Hay Rake

Johnson's Ground