Possum
Rows of razor teeth diamond the
dark,
a crazed eye wheeling into the glare
of head lamps. Bald tail dragging the road,
back bristled silver, beakish head
sweeping the night – this mystic glitch
in time’s unspooling, how he hungers
for what cuts swaths through the dark, what swerves
before he knows the truth between split beams,
the source that drives what he hazards each night
until the blood blooms hot in his nostrils –
like Hart Crane’s hung terrapins plucked
from the surge, our doomed seer pitched
into a roadside ditch, stunned and humped
gasping for the humming lights that struck him.
Tornadoes
I’ve heard it said they’re
like trains when they come,
that they change lives or take them away.
Remember how as a child you first learned
whirling could alter your world, how you spun
until the ground heaved, caught you in its lap,
how you stretched out awed beneath the sprawl
of a tossing sky? …. Imagine if you can
the dark funnel fingering its way
across the plains, finding you lost in thought,
plucking you up, mind a violent gyration.
If you come to, it’s beside a rusty wheelbarrow
pitched upside down, its single wheel a roulette
reckless, and clothes like the husks of angels
fluttering down around you, silent on the grass.
Blackberries
It may in the end come to this:
memory
the tongue will not abandon to fact,
the dark fruit bobbing in sugared cream ….
We made our shirts into baskets, dawn
hung dew-luminous on branches
cricket-thick glade abuzz with rising heat,
our young hands among thorns. It is enough
perhaps, to have lived this, to have known
the summer air stung ripe, to hold
up against all that is leaving us
these berry-stained t-shirts, fingers
purpled sticky-sweet, the warm cream
dribbling our chins, and this mouth
still bruised with what it can’t say.