five poems

Dale Smith

Cruellest Month

The cruellest month, so called,

April, driving north

radio aerated the plains

where the car overheated

on the sky

a plume of smoke

helicopters

   clipped thin horizon,

wet grey cloud scope, gun-

metal bright

1993, Interstate

Waco as I relieved the radiator cap

carefully once cool,

gripped and turned, steam

hot

wet

to find a living

world, a way into the revolution

of words

inaugural violence

place condescended on

Brazos River grasses, repelled dreams

Another Spring

Another spring,

the death of Robert Creeley,

also in Texas

I was beginning

to read Gore Vidal

on Timothy McVeigh

when he died,

backseat driving

along the Guadalupe range

in correspondence with his trajectory

our emails passed,

hawk landing in a sycamore

where I waited in late morning,

tired of the blowout, blowback,

State apparatus, narratives

like a dream, one chokes

on rural houses, telephone wire

electricity is everything

Children

Lonely, dyslexic,

Houston, Denton, Garland

sex obsessed, bible-driven

“retardo”, fourteen-year-old

mother, no father, boyfriends

abandonment, beatings, unwanted

sexual, they were children,

a child not ten years older than me

classmates didn’t take a shine

aphasia, dysgraphia, excelled

in sports, crack shot

aim, snap, smack between the eyes

of a squirrel, my Daisy

sited rabbits or robins in South

Texas woods,

wounds, adolescent

Baptist, Camero or pick-up

bed asleep under stars

Bone Flesh

Those days are blurry,

sex and church enmeshed

in me, the spirit

is a bone, is flesh

   seeking pleasure

in cars, Forest Lane

wide Midwest sky,

word of the preacher

Pauline, Protestant, Baptist

without any mind

interfering

desire, what was an Adventist

those little, thin-wooden houses

painted white under

billboards proclaiming

Christ

and the Seven Seals

one day, and go to heaven

Merchant of Sensibility

How write a letter

to the dead, unknowing

how then, not seeing

where the past and present grain

of voice or where my lived

response could grasp

objective field,

alone in the afternoon, gas

station pay phone, I called

a man I knew from high school

whose father had been shot dead

in the liquor store he owned, a bullet

landed in my friend’s face, my friend

killed the man with a shotgun

(yes, a person of color, a person of left-

out, ruinous histories, of saddened,

bent, hoar-frosted November

sedge, sod) and grease

under my nails, April wind and highway

shattering noise of cars,

grey machines on the sky

I became a merchant of sensibility

a tribal instinct for garden

spider webs in barbed-wire, rest

stop RVs, sticky hands of children reaching

for the door to the stall of the John

inside my nighttime nightly-ness

web-perfect resinous streaks of yellow

on the sky, my eyes stung

going home