Dial-A-Prayer

Along Route 10, just west of town,
a clutch of blackbirds settles down

like falling music notes that yield
to silence, in the wiregrass field.

A rusted combine rots below
a billboard, where the yellow glow

of one as-yet unbroken light
creates a halo in the night.

Lonely? Depressed? the letters read,
then answer: God knows what you need.

Call Dial-a-Prayer now. A car
streaks by like a falling star.

The driver takes no notice of
the message in the night above

but grips the wheel and races on,
an empty fifth and loaded gun

beside him on the vinyl seat.
The engine roars, the country heat

begins to wave like molten lead.
He glares out at the road ahead,

a fatal wish, a poisoned dart
aimed at the town’s unfaithful heart.
 

Remington .22

Potshots at cottonmouths
    and copperheads in the cane brake,
sudden sunrise grey-mist pops
    at the flat black skim of the lake,
cracks in the backlot squinted
    along cool blue-black sights,
fence-post tin cans arcing skywards
    in scattering pin-holed flights.

It rests in his tanned young hands:
    warm walnut, smoke-dark steel,
well-balanced, crafted and oiled,
    elegant, dangerous and real.
He hugs it to his shoulder and
    squeezes the trigger – each thought,
each image, furrow, fret or fear
    subsumed in the sound of the shot.

Soon he will exchange all this
    for deeper graces, other goods:
the scent of long loose curls, the surge
    of engines – strange new woods
and roads and shifting landscapes
    all after which his mind will run.
For now he is that native thing:
    a boy in the fields with his gun.

The Overthrown

Dark-done ranges,
expanses, reaches
of unlit roughland,
deserted beaches,

still pool of shadow,
cracked empty lot,
abandoned motels
the highway forgot:

These were the spaces
of my nascent years,
my temples of wonder,
the shapes of my fears,

the overthrown places
that falling defined
a heart by its shadow
and unloosed the mind.

But then others came
one terminal day;
the crumbling pier
was carried away.

The grey sky filled
with glass and with blue.
The motels were gone,
and I was gone too.

So now all is light,
knowledge and noise
where once were ghosts,
shadows and boys.