Blue
Ridge Bestiary
1. Vulture
Business never slows for the air's ubiquitous
morticians, their spiraling so effortless
we might admit its beauty if we didn't
know
how eagerly, in those ridiculous black boas,
they wait to begin the endless dissipation
we take as proof: we've been forsaken,
unable to believe our angels of deliverance
rise even to the murky heaven of catfish.
2. Catfish
Greedy face of the zoot-suited villain
in a movie, sharpening his dagger-thin
moustache: sonsabitches I'd wish against
each time the bobber ducked and danced--
who swallowed all my best lures whole
and hissed, as with the crusted needle-nose
I ripped the hook and the hooked heart
out
of a thousand, gasping cotton mouths.
3. Cottonmouth
The cure for life, said Socrates, is dying.
The cure for snakebite: slice your skin,
suck poison, then the guidebook says breathe
easily as the viper glides through
brittle leaves.
A pit in its face can see your thudding
heart.
Its flicked tongue tastes you sweating in
the dark.
And even the severed head strikes with
venom,
as if death's never dead, just playing possum.
4. Possum
Of all the corpses, none's more easily
forgotten
than those bellies strewn beside the road.
Rotten
entrails flaking into the treads of tires,
dark shapes hunkered on the lowest wires
as the whole scene flares into that brightness
through which we hurtle past each oracle,
oblivious
of what it means to see them suffer
and rise from ashes on the wings of vultures.
--As published in the Virginia Quarterly
Review (Spring, 2004)
Three
Elegies for O.
1. Pictures of the Dead
How could they know that they no longer
are
what, within each little square, they are?
Frozen there like children playing tag,
like they'll
wake when we get to where they are.
Some days they look at us like nobody we
know.
Like the exquisite paper dolls they are.
And some days with a glance we smell their
hair.
Smoke and leaves. That autumn where they
are.
What do you want from me? some seem to
say,
half-dead already. Now so clearly dead before
they are.
And each time we look, the glossy windows
darken.
Even the dogs stop wondering where they
are.
We stare at ourselves, arm in arm with
them.
Children point and ask us who they are.
2. In the Museum of Your Last Day
there is a coat on a coat hook in a hall.
Work gloves in the pockets, pliers and bent
nails.
There is a case of Quaker State for the
Ford.
Two cans of spray paint in a crisp brown
bag.
A mug on a book by the hi-fi.
A disc that starts on its own: Boccherini.
There is a dent in the soap the shape of
your thumb.
A swirl in the glass when it fogs.
And a gray hair that twines
through the tines of a little black comb.
There is a watch laid smooth on a wallet.
And pairs of your shoes everywhere.
A phone no one answers. A note that says
Friday.
Your voice on the tape talking softly.
3. Elegy Ending in a Dream
I thought it was like being broken.
It's like being filled with cold sand.
I thought it was fleeting, like passion.
All night in your place the plate shines.
I thought love was the meaning of heaven.
Even heaven turns to shit on my tongue.
I thought we die meant like the sun.
All day the sun sinks in the limbs.
I thought a squirrel's nest had blown down.
And found nestled inside it your hands.
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