what was meant to be sprouted from scarlet, this: your exhortation to stop picking at scabs, the crusted-over crimson of searching fingers. I meant it to be about the blood of history, all sticky rust and slave-set-free-catharsis, set outside train station where truth is buried under a clouded highway overpass and redemption pulls away with a groaning of unoiled engines. But time taps out what it will, and I have a talent for scars. Sigh, and sigh. Let’s, then, try to keep our own story from becoming pock-marked & pot-holed: the burial-ground-turned-parking-lot of that old hospital where I first learned to stitch (with catgut in formalin-fumed skins of forever), will wait.
hell’s half-acre
exercise in Southern Gothic
train comes, its wrack
the undisguisably pickled
dregs of hope de-
composing, dreaming acidly
in blue glass, mason. so
much for bloated beginnings,
point-of-departure daggered
summer afternoons in the market
where souls are at auction as
they were lifetimes ago
and charlatans lien awned
forevers under skies that
darken and gradually un-
remember. she presses
thin dress over pale thigh, fights
wind-made wrack in torn fabric,
holds her voice white-knuckled:
what price would you pay
to drain the vinegar,
slough history, begin again?
Sitting
close-legged in the James Center Starbucks i
channel my inner alchemist writing
molecules into dreams
and posing painfully
as another drip in the puddle
of humankind, my best sad delusions
melting into visible air breathed
over a single blade of grass
crowned with a frozen halo,
a
yearning or a universe trapped
there in the mud beside a stream
that flows where herons stalk
lost summer and only the
indigent and the inspired
tread the river-paths. The truth is i
love this place not two skips
from hell’s half-acre but
sometimes, lost in the ebb and curve
between railroad tracks and
monogrammed yesterdays i
wonder if the whisper
of the Devil can still be heard
above the hum of the wi-fi;
if those who sojourn in the
Burnt District of this
numbed century still
feel its scars and its sunderings
although
some things it seems haven’t
changed at all: men
are still shaped
by the subjects they should have learned
in grammar school and poets
still prefer windows and the
real truth of it is, i guess,
that here where the trains slow
and the James flows on uncomplaining,
herons have always stalked
lost summers, and ice,
like mankind’s worst
delusions, will always
melt
one sad drop
at a time.