Selected
Poems:
The
Life Cycle of Moths
Sometimes
I wonder why she didn't kill us
when she had the chance.
Why
she didn't smoke or drink,
or take the drugs, fashionable then.
Why she didn't drive the car
into guardrails, embankments—
bursting her belly
against skull of steering wheel.
Somehow it happened,
and if you could have seen inside her,
you would have seen us:
small, woven into her underbelly,
miniature women still without fur,
moth-hands clutched together,
praying even then.
—
from "Follow
Me Down"
Winner of North
American Review's James Hearst Poetry Prize,
2008
Honesty
There’s
an honesty to planting,
in saying to seeds,
here’s what I want from you:
grow.
Grow
until your heads touch
the tallest slat on the tumbledown wall
and then bud. Break open your heads
and flower, and when that’s done,
fruit.
In
return, I will give you
meal, minerals, the dung of cloven
animals. I will take measure
of your soil and add what you need,
take what I
should.
In
January, I will hang you
with leftover fir,
grind trees
to place at your
feet.
I’ll
pluck snails from your leaves,
sluggish brown bodies loathe
to part from your
succulence.
I will
water you in a slow warm
stream, the garden hose wrapped
at my feet, a gently coiled cobra
who will not
strike.
I will
break back
your dead wood.
I will feed you in spring.
I will take only what I need,
and then I will say to you:
sleep.
—
from "Follow
Me Down"
This
poem first appeared in New Southerner, Spring 2009
and is currently under consideration for a Pushcart Prize.
Neshoba
County, Mississippi, 1964
The
bodies were mounded in an earthen dam,
waterlogged and rough-rocked, shot through
with silt, more clay than flesh – set up to stem the
flow
of the river, though the water ran through them still.
Waterlogged
and rough-rocked, shot through
the back as they drove deep rutted roads, headed
for the river – the water runs through them still.
Dragged like four-point bucks, fresh shot and killed.
Back
down deep rutted roads, beheaded
limbs deadweight in the mouths of dogs;
dragged like four-point bucks, fresh shot and killed.
The smell of fear marched through our town.
Limbs
deadweight in the mouths of dogs, buried
so they’d no longer lie down, covering us
as the smell of fear marched through our town –
the darkness threatened to wash us all away.
They’d
no longer lie down, covering us –
the air was hung with blood, thick with disaster;
the darkness threatened to wash us all away,
breath was thick in our lungs that summer.
The
air was hung with blood, thick with disaster;
bodies more clay than flesh, set up to stem the flow
of breath, thick in our lungs that summer –
the bodies were found, mounded in an earthen dam.
—
from "Follow
Me Down"
This
poem first appeared in Shenandoah, Fall/Winter 2009
and is currently under consideration for a Pushcart Prize.
Dead
Horse Trail
The Alaskan Klondike, 1898
One
ton of goods per person:
supplies to start a life
hauled
by hand, sled or horses,
fifteen hundred steps in glacial ice,
a slow stampede of pick-ax and sewing machine.
Three
thousand horses dead along the way,
small price to pay for gold and good luck.
Whipped
by ice, snow, and stick
through slush and stink
of mud, man and beast,
they
did not rest for winter,
did not pause as glaciers do;
their
bones splayed in rocky passes
white wings—the
bowl of the rib cage
overturned in the snow.
Some
walked to the ledge,
stepped slowly over
hooves
cleaving air for an instant
dark against snow,
then striking rock:
the
accordion of bone
breaking in small syllables.
—
from "Follow
Me Down"
Winner of the Gabehart Prize, 2007
Laurel County
There must have been times
Kentucky seemed a life sentence,
a dark-veined monster burning coal in her belly,
the coughs that stained your linens black
no matter how many times you bleached them back
by the creek where you caught crawdads for supper.
You tell me of life but do not mention hunger,
you speak instead of land: tramping the fields in the wake
of your father,
finding a fishing hole or story, and the last time you saw
him,
Pappaw told you how Granddaddy got killed by a train,
cut in two on his way to the Hensley place—
this, during Prohibition, and a man did what he could.
Your mother canned beans and berries
from the share-cropped fields behind the house.
I remember the jam, thick and expensive on Wonder Bread.
I never understood why you'd fix me with thundercloud eyes
if I did not finish my piece,
your Cherokee granny's picture glaring from the other room.
You made a kite for me once, weaving far into the night
a red tailed hawk with scarlet ribbons streaming like entrails
against the gray Kentucky sky.
I ran and ran,
legs fighting my lungs—
could not let it fall.
You were on the hilltop—skirt
taut,
caught between your legs, signaling something,
I could not make out what,
the kite obscuring my vision—
the wind would catch it, then let it fall.
— from "A
Wild Region"
This poem first appeared in New Southerner, June/July
2006
The Politics of Wanting
The government of lost souls,
the language of loneliness,
there is never enough.
She knows that now.
The man she married
leaves his keys in the door
as if planning an escape route
should he wake in the middle of the night
look over at her sleeping form,
decide his heart cannot last another day.
In the mornings he makes her coffee,
a small offering of peace.
Weeks go by without their touching;
moving past one another in hallways
they apologize for a brushed arm, elbow,
the hanging sorrow of a love grown cold.
She watches him with the horses,
how he grips their manes, racing against clouds.
He looks at her strangely,
she wonders if he can read her mind.
The vicious pruning of time,
the inept metaphor of sleep,
the grass-green beauty
of the way she moves beneath him
as he wills himself to other lands.
— from "A
Wild Region"
This poem first appeared in Slipstream #26
When We Were Young
I was always the darker one,
dusky as a gypsy my Granny said,
with cat-colored eyes,
legs longer than was good for me,
always bruised from climbing trees,
my sister, china eyed,
skin paler than any moon—
smooth as the jazz
our parents played late at night
after we'd gone to bed.
I saw them once
moving slowly into each other
against the pale August night,
his dark hand on her shoulder,
her laughter, the brightest sound
I have ever known
sailing up and over
lighting every candle in the room.
—
from "A
Wild Region"
Click
here to see additional poems from A Wild Region
Click here to see additional
poems from Follow Me Down
