"Squalls" is available via Amazon, and also locally in Baton Rouge at the Red Stick Reads bookstore on Eugene, at Cavalier House Books (114 North Range) in Denham Springs and at the Conundrum Bookstore on the main-drag in St. Francisville.
Below are some recordings and print outs of poems.
This poem from "My Life In Cars" first appeared in the San Pedro River Review.
Woman Hollering Creek
I pass over Woman Hollering Creek headed East on I-10
at 80 mph on a rainy Saturday and wake up Sunday
morning with an image of a woman with matted black hair
on the banks alone, wailing about what I do not know,
but loud and long enough that half the town or more
must have stopped to listen. Maybe her grief was too sharp
for anyone to want to intrude, or maybe the better part
of that county was someways related to the woman’s husband
and just couldn’t afford the complex burden of opposing him
to give her sympathy, risk years of his crosswise looks, curses.
A lot of those Lone Star buckeroos are hard-cooked
sons of bitches. So she stayed down below the flat, level land,
its cattle, its sagebrush, mesquite, in a deep cut where rains
run off. Sand, caked mud. She screamed, wrenched.
The town listened, and remembered. Talked about it for years,
even after she left, went back to where it was she came from.
‘Til finally she came to own that creek with her sorrow.
Still does own it by name in a land so dry, so hostile
that many of the people there had given up on having feelings
other than thirst or hunger a few generations beforehand.
Woman Hollering Creek
I pass over Woman Hollering Creek headed East on I-10
at 80 mph on a rainy Saturday and wake up Sunday
morning with an image of a woman with matted black hair
on the banks alone, wailing about what I do not know,
but loud and long enough that half the town or more
must have stopped to listen. Maybe her grief was too sharp
for anyone to want to intrude, or maybe the better part
of that county was someways related to the woman’s husband
and just couldn’t afford the complex burden of opposing him
to give her sympathy, risk years of his crosswise looks, curses.
A lot of those Lone Star buckeroos are hard-cooked
sons of bitches. So she stayed down below the flat, level land,
its cattle, its sagebrush, mesquite, in a deep cut where rains
run off. Sand, caked mud. She screamed, wrenched.
The town listened, and remembered. Talked about it for years,
even after she left, went back to where it was she came from.
‘Til finally she came to own that creek with her sorrow.
Still does own it by name in a land so dry, so hostile
that many of the people there had given up on having feelings
other than thirst or hunger a few generations beforehand.
The 4:52, Looking At Everything, Looking At Nothing
Published in Chicago Literati July 2017
Down Van Buren, flash past bums, mounds
under shirts, vests, coats hunkered into what
heat they can win between brick and sidewalk.
Blow through the doorways of Union Station
in a flood , teeming, over-ridden, born along. Heels,
soles click across marble flooring. Intent, intent.
Hit Westbound Track 11, oil-smeared, black with grit.
A place locked into nothing but the coming and the
going. Left abysmal, unnoticed as a coroner’s fingernails.
Twenty coaches glisten. Streamlined, every one.
Bustle in and put the bum down onto leather
padded with fiber, horsehair, exhaustion.
When with a wrench and screech the thing pulls out,
pigeons dart from rafters into a light so powerful it
squints the eyes that slowly readjust and focus onto
broad lots of rubble and tawny weeds, apartment backs
where stairwells Z, sun blistered. warped, snow dusted.
Feral cats. The occasional smoker restless and numb.
Miles and miles of brickwork and steel where whiskey
glass goes shelf to hand to mouth, shatters across
pavement. Gets shuffled to gutter beside old Trib print.
After Brookfield there’s a shift. Swept streets, shops
in rows, each with their key and determination. Fluorescent
light weak with hope and worry and forbearance.
Suddenly trees erupt along the way, copses rip by. Yards.
Yards roll. Now you come upon the snow-bent boughs
of Morton Arboretum. A sanctuary set aside, deeded by
that famous salt baron in the twenties. Gem overflowing
with oak, maple, hickory, spruce. Designed to be green
in every season. Hushed hillsides safe as old money.
Published in Chicago Literati July 2017
Down Van Buren, flash past bums, mounds
under shirts, vests, coats hunkered into what
heat they can win between brick and sidewalk.
Blow through the doorways of Union Station
in a flood , teeming, over-ridden, born along. Heels,
soles click across marble flooring. Intent, intent.
Hit Westbound Track 11, oil-smeared, black with grit.
A place locked into nothing but the coming and the
going. Left abysmal, unnoticed as a coroner’s fingernails.
Twenty coaches glisten. Streamlined, every one.
Bustle in and put the bum down onto leather
padded with fiber, horsehair, exhaustion.
When with a wrench and screech the thing pulls out,
pigeons dart from rafters into a light so powerful it
squints the eyes that slowly readjust and focus onto
broad lots of rubble and tawny weeds, apartment backs
where stairwells Z, sun blistered. warped, snow dusted.
Feral cats. The occasional smoker restless and numb.
Miles and miles of brickwork and steel where whiskey
glass goes shelf to hand to mouth, shatters across
pavement. Gets shuffled to gutter beside old Trib print.
After Brookfield there’s a shift. Swept streets, shops
in rows, each with their key and determination. Fluorescent
light weak with hope and worry and forbearance.
Suddenly trees erupt along the way, copses rip by. Yards.
Yards roll. Now you come upon the snow-bent boughs
of Morton Arboretum. A sanctuary set aside, deeded by
that famous salt baron in the twenties. Gem overflowing
with oak, maple, hickory, spruce. Designed to be green
in every season. Hushed hillsides safe as old money.
These next two are recordings ( with print and related painting ) from my first book, "Engines of Belief."
Edouard Vuillard "Portrait of Xavier Roussel"
- Public Domain
