Billy Gawain

We’d been traipsing the long afternoon
through the bramble, when we came upon
him hanging from the oak, his black boots
almost scraping on the ground, bowing
down a branch half-cleft from the oak’s crown.
His hands seemed to take back what he’d done,
they at least had wanted life, clawing,
frantic to unknot the fraying jute,
his thick, blackened nails cut and bloodied.
Now the arms hung loosely at his side.

His trousers were stained dark in the crotch,
the eyes in his ancient face held watch
on the air where the black crows circled.
I’d never seen a body before,
cut down and laid out in the stinkweed.
He had no kin, so he was buried
with our own, the only name he bore
the name we gave him and had chiseled
on his headstone at the spring solstice:
“Billy Gawain, A Stranger to Us.”

From Swimming the Eel; first appeared in
The Evansville Review, Spring 2011

Winter Cord

He dreamt of flying, of infants tumbling
like towhees through the air
and woke to see her feeding their child.

He rose, washed his hands, and went out,
scouting for places of over-growth and setting
the sap-sticky saw-teeth to bite.
The air churned, dust scattered. From the shack,
she could just hear the crackling
and splitting of wood—a long day's work,

a summer song for winter wood.

From Swimming the Eel; first appeared in
the inaugural edition of Journal of Peace & Hope

The Yellow Fields

My own mother was a small town girl, dark
and slim, unschooled, artless, and big-hearted—
who kept a clean house atop a green hill,
and mothered her four children. That's all—
until the day she unwound the turban
of home and ran out bareheaded, leaving
us for dreams, for the Idea of Love.
Small town life had turned stale and boring. We
had turned stale and boring. She wanted out.
She wanted the new life she dreamed of now,
quick, she threw wide open the doors of her
cell and walked out to the yellow fields.
She didn't consider having to spin
her powers to god, in heaven, she didn't reckon
the waterfall of loss, how its pounding
muffled the sounds and scents around her.
Head bare, she walked out into the open,
where the deer step at twilight, ears twitching,
downwind of the hunter's scent, the scent of
powder in the guns, and of grass burning.

From Swimming the Eel;
first appeared in Song of the San Joaquin

Oscar

Not the tail-wagging beagle who followed her
everywhere in the fields off Laurel Street—
spotty, floppy-eared, who later took up
sheep rustling, not the black and white pug,
round-cheeked and -bellied, smelly, mouth
dripping, rear wriggling—no, this was Oscar,
the marigold-colored mutt who, the day
she sat splay-legged by the nasturtiums
on the summer veranda, trotted up
from fields of corn and when she started up,
sprang and bit—hard—her upturned face,
spilling the blood that sent waves through her,
along the dress she wore, her sister's dress,
the one already red, now red again
in each seam stitched by the mother's hand.

First appeared in Monterey Poetry Review 2007