Poems June 2013
Native
At sixteen,
sixteen miles
from Abilene
(Trent,
to be exact),
hellbent
on being not
this, not that,
I drove
a steamroller
smack-dab over
a fat black snake.
Up surged a cheer
from men
so cheerless
cheers
were grunts, squints,
whisker twitches
it would take
a lunatic acuity
to see.
I saw
the fat black snake
smashed flat
as the asphalt
flattening
under all ten tons
of me,
flat as the landscape
I could see
no end of,
flat as the affect
of distant killing
vigilance
it would take a native
to know was love.
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 Number 10, on page 28
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