Half the people that I went to school with look like John Daly.

January Pome

 When My Brother’s Orders Changed

After his thirty-day leave,
after the flight from Charlotte
to San Francisco,
two days before Vietnam,
we marked his return to Tinker AFB.

His wife watched the commander’s kids.
His crew loaded mines
meant for Haiphong Harbor
and other NVA ports.

We celebrated. We thanked God,
never stopping to think
that somewhere else
another brother,
another husband,
another son
would have to go.

Mackey Pome

 After the Abortion

 

He’d given her an orchid

That swam on the mantel

In a cheap glass vase.

There was a framed nude

He’d done of her before

They got married

That hung where it watched

Him as he crossed the room.

She sat in a wicker chair

Reading a Rolling Stone,

Her beautiful face darker

Than the one he’d drawn.

There was a mark he’d left

Below her eye yesterday

With a fist

Instead of

A pencil.

Sunday One

 Frankincense and Myrrh  

 

I felt like a fraud when I stood

In front of a class as I

Do when I am reading poems

Or talking over baseball

Pictures in a slideshow that

No longer surprises me

Except in the fact that an

Audience was coerced to

Watch it instead of pecking

At their phones—do we all live

Past nostalgia, I wonder,

As my dad’s face flashes on

The back row of a ball team

And I no longer mention

Him in his blue coaching cap.

Or that he was so sure of

His belief in what he was

Doing and where he was going

That he transcended fraudulence

When he spoke about the Lord. 

Pome from October

 Poem for Michael Rumaker

 

Angels and fairies were dancing together

In the blue moonlight until you couldn’t

Tell which was which, on the head of a pin

Which was a lonely old man’s glassy eyeball

Which was a warm planet circling death

Which was a yellow marble on a red dirt playground

In a finger drawn circle, surrounded by

Boy monsters and pig tailed jump rope girls.

Panther Winds

 Panther Winds

 

The poet with the false voice

Is laboring to be true as the

Blast of a truck horn

On a foggy morning

Crossing the Jacob Fork River.

True as the motionless cows

Grazing on tick weed by a

Sour gap of stunted maples.

Panthers are just one of

The things he doesn’t believe:

Existence being the better part

Of blood proof he also applies

To gods and any holiness

A man might assign

To beer kisses or

Half fuzzy shadows,

Convinced he has found

Himself in the distance

And the absence of light.

Spring Poem

 12.51

 

Surprise grows over the path

Through the woods where I became

The student of close history,

Of the great floating orchard

Of vines and shadowy snakes.

Let me window the morning

And mound the best afternoon.

Let me stand the dead like this:

Rabbit, lizard, coyote,

Crows nesting up in the pines.

I have nothing else to say.