Saturday Pome

 

Day in the Life 2024

 

The truck in front of us says

In huge bold back window letters:

Avoid the father

Ram the daughter

I’m watching my wife look at this

As we pass the Long View Internet Café

Max’s Junk Yard and Lowman’s Motel

There’s some class, she says

But I’m thinking about my granddaughters

 

The strippers are mowing the grass

At the Treasure Club as we pass

I remember running to the basement

Of the library to get to the shelf

That had the sports books

I remember the smell of those books

 

We’re back behind the truck

With its roaring muffler

Its temporary politics

They turn right

Where we turn left

That’s how it is

When I get home

I’m gonna hug those girls.

Thursday Poem

 

About to Knock

 

Behind the busted clapboard shack

A sea of broken lawnmowers swam

In a pine-needle gulley.

A swarm of mopeds more abandoned

Than parked in the grassless yard,

Tarpapered windows

Kept the world at length.

The finance creditor stopped

His Buick Regal by the road,

Stepped perilously through

Thistle and briar bush toward

The stepless plywood porch.

In the sun nothing stirred.

Till he stood at the door,

An expensive steel contraption

With a teardrop window,

About to knock.

Morning Poem

 

Obscure

 

Early enough in the day,

Surely I’m about to surprise myself.

If I listen good, I hear

The momma turkey conducting

Her eight chicks across the trail

I will reach in five clicking minutes,

The light a perfect yellow fade

Into scrub hickories thick

As a full court press.

A fat copperhead, still full of night,

Crawling toward the granite

Aperture of his domain

Pauses to blend with pine needles

In a slow pitch of shadow

I pass without knowing.