Tupelo

I heard you folded up your leaves,
canceled class, and left
the ivy walls that dropped you
... like ripe fruit broke from
fifteen years’ work,
dissertation slung like a vine
from your weary southern back.

I heard you raked up all those tomes
left your cold water kitchen
dead palm, type ribbon
and took a Memphis train
for tall blue grass
and a house-on-stilts
knee deep in bayou mud.

I heard you went back to Tupelo
where your tree moss roots
remembered Daddy’s bitter
heart wood and Mama’s
blue magnolia shade.

American River

>

Under the frozen water

Trout lie in

Blue shadows cut

Through with rays

Ice coats the rock where

We sat holding out

Our poles hoping for

A bite, heads together

Over a knot, piercing

waxy pink eggs

with barb-less hooks.

Don’t die!

You jump up

holding the silver muscle

of a brookie in the moon

of your hand,

and bend, red cheeked,

white fingers twisting

out the hook

You float him,

sifting water

through his gills.

He sleeps on his side.

He’s dead, you say,

eyelashes

Ready for tears.

The tail moves

Flips a sickle of water,

We laughed then

done fishing

While our luck holds.

You come to the lake for blue water, but it's the reeds standing hip deep, yellow dragonflies holding along their spines, a maze for birdlets, bedevilled fish hooks, snakes to wind through. Rooted down beyond the prism of water, it's how they only move in wind or waves but sift oil from the surface, and gather up and hold the evening fog.

How the cold lingers
holding back
the thaw, holding up
a fine lace of crystal
a powder white scaffold

built to the tree side
sharing the bark with
moss, lichen, pitch,
pollen, insect
shards. How an eye
stumbling in pointless
boots tries to freeze
this picture.

Theodore

At a moment, what seemed only leaves will erupt like this: color, nectar, ants. No reason is given, only this gesture, saying what, I open? Still, if you look long enough, their purpose will arise in you, a wordless shiver, an unfolding.

She sees a bloom, out come the clippers. At home she'll jam their ends in a glass, watch the rot creep up the stems until they nod, spilling pollen on the sterile table top.

Theodore

I hear the snow before it comes, the flakes hit one another as they form high above, sharp against sharp, powder on powder, they send down a collective, audible creak long before one falls, a sound my veins stop the blood to hear. Then the smell that says flakes are in the air that can’t yet be seen. Sometimes it stops there, the dusting known only to me and those with minuscule perceptions, dogs, birds, certain insects. I walk through the trees, breathing it in, watching out, yearning for their chalk white geometry. Snow is an example of the system, how it works, why. Nobody invented snow – it unfolded before us as part of the great unfolding I witnessed, a mathematical unfolding, a reasoned unfolding: checks were in it, balances, the stunning revelation of it, the perfection, the symmetry flavored with the random. So beautiful, heartrending in its noise, its grace, the ugliness giving it savor, the surprise built in, the spontaneous.

Bones

What became of Kaja? I can tell you how her teeth hang looser in their bone, how a molar will fall on a day in August, slide to the dirt, move three inches in a hard rain and then sink in before the bed of decaying leaves hardens to hold it in place. How it will stay there in the drying ground, ready for a bite. How it will stay there and then, in the freeze of autumn, crack audibly, startling a vole, a jerk of the head, just one of a thousand twitches in an afternoon of foraging, watchful for sound, vibration, movement, startling often for none of these, out of anticipation – this perceived by no one but the weak essence that lingers over the bones, eight inches from the vole, the essence that is our Kaja, and she will sigh with impatience to see it wasted.