Collage
Vespers
Lord in the pigment, the crushed, colored stones.
Lord in the carved marble chest. I turn away
from art. You are between my eye and what I see.
Forgive my errant gaze. Tonight, I can’t sleep
and won’t frighten the deer in my peonies.
Like children who rub their grimy hands over everything,
they only want to touch and be touched by the grass.
They’ve never known violence, cars howling out of darkness.
Lord in the camellia, drifting in and out of sight,
like those blushing, perfumed heads will you welcome me?
I, too, am little more than a stranger in your garden.
Stroke my velvety antlers. Open your palms.
–Derrick Austin, from Trouble the Water
February Truck Stop
Wind in a low place.
A distance between Tallow Ridge
and Nerval Draw
measured in bruised light.
Trees howl through
the weather, ditch-dark clouds
touch the ground, and two men,
from one diesel pump
to another, shout something
about erotic pines
and the sum of heaven.
Their voices wrung out,
punched through, full of snow
and glitter-slick miles.
I consider nothing
of the days before
or the days to come.
Trucks chain up across the road.
Rigs crawling down from the summit
smell of hot brakes and spoiled fish.
The erotic pines.
The sum of heaven.
Voices cross a cement slab
and find each other.
I raise a hand to each,
as is the way here,
then get back in my truck.
–Michael McGriff, from Angel Sharpening Its Beak
Reading the Classifieds on Mill Road
This light
across the silt beds–
unceremonial, jimmied
into place, out of style
yet oracular.
To describe it
runs a grease rag over it.
If nothing else,
this light holds the scrapyard together.
It makes the chains call
to the load binder.
It tricks the gravel
into undressing
before the dusty mirror
of my thought.
With the Nickel Shopper
spread across the steering wheel
and the window cracked,
I hear a voice rise up
from a cigarette burn
in the seat. So this
is the voice of God?
No, just the silence here
pinned to a windless day
of little consequence
where the mind asserts
its patterns and voices.
Old Appliances.
A horse trailer
you can have for free
if you haul it off.
I fold the paper back
into its square
and think of boats
and crowns
the dead might make.
It’s true, I think of them,
here, in this place,
with their bad teeth
and accents
who’ve become
the fists of stubbled wheat
beneath the snow.
I unwind my roll
of Lion Mints,
tamp a pack of smokes
against the dash.
Three times for luck
and once for the dead.
I turn the key.
I pull on the lights.
I pass into the absolute
color beneath the hour.
–Michael McGriff from Angel Sharpening Its Beak
Foreclosure
You have to line everything up out in the front field.
Combines swathers cab-tractors & whatever else is worth anything.
Then the ditchers square-bailers hayrakes.
Machinery you might as well pull over to the county museum.
When is it ever open?
No one you know has ever been inside.
You imagine a glass case of single-shot Winchesters.
A windlass & a hundred feet of hemp rope.
A calico dress.
The shoulders so small you don’t even believe your dreams.
You have to haul what’s inside out too.
Headboards china hutches dining room tables.
People walk up & down the long rows.
If anyone hears the wind ripping at the seams of things they don’t say so.
They don’t say anything.
–Joe Wilkins, from Pastoral, 1994
A Man Steps into the Gymnasium for the Saturday Night Basketball Game
& his sinews pull at his bones
as the wind pulls at the cottonwoods,
as the river eats at the bridge’s moorings–
& the bodies of the hunched, hero-dreaming spectators
& galloping players & bespectacled referees
are one body, & molecules of herbicide tick
in the alveoli of every blooming lung–
the gravel roads lead tonight away from town,
& the ditches dry down,
& the beeves rip the last bunchgrass down to the roots–
as my grandfather hauls the banker up by his shirtfront
& in a shower of popcorn & red licorice
tosses him down the bleachers, alive
to all that is honorable and wrong in us.
–Joe Wilkins, from Pastoral, 1994
Tidewater Psalm
…in heaven it is always Autumn
–John Donne, Christmas Sermon, 1624
By sunset, the crickets’ trilling begins
in the airless damp, rich with salt
and the sulfurous fumes the Gulf flags off.
Bristling cattails brush my hands.
The light-crested water rises and falls
like a chest flecked with blonde hairs.
I feel estranged from You.
A shoal of minnows breaks, silvering
my ankles, like a mirror; my heart swims
in gladness at the changeable world.
Tell me in heaven it’s warm enough to wade
into this fine transparence, never want for air,
only light and water, and be as the river
flowing into the sea which gives up its name.
–Derrick Austin, from Trouble the Water