September Siesta

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I lounge alone on Peter’s patio
that frames the gathering grey clouds storming past
between high-hanging, stock-still clouds of white
and me boxed here against the coming night.
The sun scores silhouettes on banks of white
and writes initials on the crescent moon.
The moon, self-centred from this patio,
backlights high-flying swallows as they flow
and flip, appearing swiftly from stage left
to exit right as cannon fire that soars
up moonwards. Downstage, modern feasting Moors
and Christians re-enact their ancient wars.

Mansuetude

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Grass slithers like a snake can make it do.
I’d throw my knife but I’d be scared to fetch
it back, and what it maybe might go hit.
And suddenly I’m crying
and I sink flat out down somewhere near the path
and the lavender I crush absorbs my tears
and Georgia red-clay blues hot-wire my brain.

Old songs I have not heard in twenty years
and some I never sang
ignite a welder’s torch between my ears.

The flame, too bright for conscience, channels webs
I spin each night with anybody’s legs
and God reclaims the Chevrolet Impala

and you say, ‘No, no, we were never pinned,’
and a paunchy self-assured grasshopper wearing
lime lime lime lime green
mounts the grass stalk by me, slowly turns his back,

and he and I watch as creation passes:
ants, black wasp, September afternoon.

Sylvan

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The hill-hung house wakes to another day.
Behind it, up the mountainside I’ve climbed,
I stand inside an early-morning cloud
that waits for the rising sun to wipe it out.
The chiggers waiting in the Queen Anne’s Lace,
the ticks in the path, the web across my face,
and the thorns in every locust tree I touch
persuade me I have not changed much coming home.
But I who have returned am other than
the molecules I was when I ran down
the mountain to the college and the sea.

The flaking house paint shows me chalky grey
foundation boards the garden snails have slimed.
Beneath the porch where once a possum cowered
and played it died each time I’d jump or shout,
I see the wagon that we used to race
and I do my very best but still can’t trace
my old acquaintances. They used to matter much,
I tell myself, and scratch names in the loam
that covers where, back then, a small brook ran
from just above the house down through the town
in search of deeper waters, just like me.

Bésame, Carnicero

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Pig Duroc’s uncle What Me Worry
had ended, Duroc knew, as curry.
So our hero harbours little
sympathy for humans. Spittle

mars his enunciation when he
thinks back to the pony’s whinny
when the butcher’s axe had ended
hopes his uncle’s life extended

beyond the age that is now Duroc’s.
He knows the butcher is thinking ham hocks
so Pig Duroc plays his trump card,
speaks Spanish, speaking fast and hard

to the pony: ‘Palomino,
life is one sour Maraschino.
Kick the brute. Eternity
for him or his axe’s kissing me.’