Poetry - Why Must There be Iambs?

Iambics are the sky through which words fly
Formations sweeping all five seasons across
In order royal and in right service to
The aspirations of all noble youths

For verses built without a careful plan
Fall but as clutter on a wasted page
Their meanings and intents broken apart
And lost (like sophomores between each class)

Free verse is only an unanswered why:
Iambics are the sky through which dreams fly

Long-fallen stars and quarrelling lords must wait
For seasons upon seasons to pass in flight
Seasons, and Feasts upon a Table set
Untasted by sleepers, and winged away

But, exiles, you may taste of mercy here
And you may taste forever of that Feast
If you are not afraid to hear the silence
Where out of time all healing will be given

If you can trust that which you cannot know -
Long-fallen stars and quarrelling lords will wait


1 C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

An ironmonger is a but a hardware store
And equally inaccurate both ways
For not nearly all that is mongered is iron
Just as not all that is hardware is hard

At the ironmonger one finds toilet seats
Hammers and saws, water valves, mosquito spray
Welders’ caps and leather gloves, wrecking bars
And hunting licenses against the fall

Coffee in paper cups, men vested in jeans
Stained with the work of tending the Garden
Chanting the liturgies of field and shop
Of pump and plow and press, piston and plane

Cups empty, then, their Ite, missa est:
“Well, boys, I got to go now; y’all be blessed”

Always Check for Scorpions in Your Boots

If in Viet-Nam you enjoyed the right
Of taking off your smelly boots at night
You kept them close to you, lest they march away
You didn’t want to be barefoot at break of day

Then when some idiot yelled “Boots and saddles!”
(He’d seen too many films, and was somewhat addled)
(True, “saddles” and “addled” don’t really rhyme)
You checked for scorpions every old time

Though now your uniforms are ties and suits
You always check for scorpions in your boots

Ite ad Joseph*

For Joseph Thaddeus Petty
Sunday, 8 October 2017

Then let us go in to Joseph this day,
His day, soft-cradled in his mother’s arms;
He does not rule Egypt, but rather, our hearts
In the ordained hierarchy of love

His sisters in their turns nestle him too -
“Be sure to support his head – yes, that’s right” –
Their playmate new in the garden of life,
Their brother in the cloisters of Creation

He sleeps, so, shhhhhh – now let us slip away
For we have greeted Joseph on this happy day

For Thomas V. Morris and William J. Bennett
In gratitude for a wonderful summer at Notre Dame

O, thou dry Jansenist! A night of fire
Left in your pocket like a shopping list
Sitting quietly in a room, will never burn
To set your sere and withered soul alight

And one might wager that your calculator
In brass, for counting brass, touches not the heart
Which has its reasons which the mind knows too
Pensees which never make a night a day

Forgive thou, then, this *lettre provincial
And count it as a friend’s *memorial

A Letter from Ekaterinburg

Dormition of the Theotokos
1917

Dear Alexei,

We are enjoying a beautiful summer –
The days have been perfect ever since spring
Cooler mornings now, and that’s about it -
Nothing exciting ever happens here

How is the new government working out?
Some of the banknotes are overprinted
With vague slogans covering the Czar, but
Nothing exciting ever happens here

Petrograd must be exciting for you, but
Nothing exciting ever happens here.

Write soon,

-Mitya

Dear Anonymous Google Accuser:

Thank you for your note, the contents of which sound much like the block warden’s caution (“Your attitude is noticed, comrade.”) to Yuri in the film version of Doctor Zhivago.

I have re-read the column, which I wrote nine years ago, and find nothing offensive in it (although it is rather puerile), nor do you detail exactly what is offensive in it and why I should be sanctioned. You are being Kafka-esque, and I say this as someone who has read Kafka: you do not tell me what offense I have purportedly committed nor do you face me with an accuser. You do not even face me with you, for you do not give your name. You employ the passive voice in referring to an “Adult Content policy” and to “Community Guidelines,” which sound like something from an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner: “The Committee won’t like this, Number Six.”

Google (and one could find “google” offensive, with its history of mocking someone’s physical characteristics) is a private company, and so is free to publish or not publish, as is only right.  And I am free to pity Google for moral, ethical, and literary cowardice.

But you say that I am insensitive.

I was raised in situational poverty, barely graduated from high school, and spent 18 months in Viet-Nam. Upon returning to the USA (with life-long skin cancer which the DVA denies) I worked straight nights (double shifts on weekends) as an ambulance driver and later an LVN to put myself through university. I taught for almost forty years in public school, community college, and university as an adjunct instructor of no status whatsoever. In retirement I volunteered with our local school’s reading program until the Covid ended that, and I still volunteer with the lads at the local prison. I volunteer in community cleanup after our hurricanes (tho’ I’m getting a little old for that). I’ve worked hard all my life, paid my taxes, paid off my house at age 70, receive only half of my Social Security because of some vague law, and never gamed the system. Indeed, I would say that the system has gamed me.

But you say that I am insensitive.

In Viet-Nam, by the way, I was not the shooter; I was the shootee. I served as a Navy Corpsman in the ICU at the Station Hospital in DaNang, in the outpatient clinic at Camp Tien Sha in DaNang, and finally at Moc Hoa on the Cambodian border. Several hundred people, mostly young Americans, but also ARVN, VC, NVA, Vietnamese civilians, and Cambodian civilians survived because I was there for them.

But you say than I am insensitive.

And was all of this so that some frightened committee of anonymous inquisitors staring at an Orwellian telescreen or a Mordor-ish Palantir could find an innocuous scribble insensitive?

Pffffft.

Sincerely,

Lawrence Hall

Michaelmas Term

We might as well call it Augustinemas term
Beginning as it does on Augustine’s feast;
And though there are Vandals outside the gates
And Pelagians within, we must read

Tolle lege: take up and read. We read
We read because the scholar at his book,
Its whispered pages strewn with Paters and Aves,
Rebukes the insolence of each transient age -

The drums, the guns, the men of destiny
Are but processionals of shadows and mist

When powered up in operation mode
A structure rotates like a merry-go-mad
At the cylinder’s cone, and further back
Uprights rectilineal pulse in place

A slender tube poised for flight, it seems,
All sinister and sleek, ready for launch -
But purposed for what?
                                               Electrification
Of dental hygiene for The People’s teeth

Our Man in Havana has sent us the pix:
The Atomic Toothbrush is our dental fix!

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
Is certainly not uncertain at all
Or, rather, to avoid the negative
The certainty is that no one gets it

Not even the skilled quantum mechanic
That thoughtful hermitian operator
On his symmetry-breaking creeper beneath
A cosmological Schrodinger’s Cat

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
Doesn’t rhyme with orange or anything else

                                   Observation Changes the End

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                     From Shakespeare: Happily Lacking in Originality

                                    Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76

A new sort of sunrise cannot be invented
Our loving moon is the same year after year
Summer lawns for barefootin’ are old news
Happy yellow bathtub ducks splash forever

And so my love for you cannot be renewed
Because it has no expiration date
My iambs and occasional rhymes are always fresh
From singing joyfully of ever-new you

A new sort of sunrise cannot be invented -
Except when you say “Good morning!” each day

A Russian Soldier, 1918

A Russian soldier, Moskina1 in hand,
Though filthy, tired, unknown, unpaid, unfed,
Fights for his God, his Czar, and his Fatherland:
No medals, no *****, no sleep, no bread

His clumsy lowest-bidder boots,2 they rot
Into the foulness where the world’s sins pitch
Into the slime of old Iscariot3
Good men to die in some Gehenna-ditch

Saint George, Saint Michael, and Saint Seraphim
Preserve him in the end from Judas’ crime4
Life’s-end tears, life’s-end prayers, a blood-choked scream
And so he climbs the trench wall one last time,

Three cartridges5 clenched in his frozen fist,
He disappears at last into the mist6

1. Mosin-Nagant rifle
2. Betrayal by contractors
3. Betrayal by politicians and Bolsheviks
4. This Russian soldier does not fail his duty
5. Ammunition shortage / the Trinity / God, Czar, and Fatherland
6. This Russian soldier is known only to God

Now That We All Know What a Plinth Is…

What will we establish upon our bare, ruined plinths
Where late the stern-visaged generals stood? 1
Guitarists, perhaps, or free-verse poets
Or refugees from Harvard’s sophomore class

We could ***** erections to erections
As advertised on the family radio
With brazen legends reading “Hey-Hey! **-**”
Honoring the noble eloquence of our age

Or, with roses for remembrance, leave them bare
Amid shrill protestations of despair


1 Cf. Sonnet 73, Shakespeare

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                       A Footprint on the Road to Santiago

A footprint on the road to Santiago
It has meaning - a footprint, and another
An indent from the ferrule of a stick
Toward a vision of a Field of Stars

Sin-weary and sunburnt, a pilgrim plods
Through weeds and dust and sometimes traffic lights
And idlers mocking from across the road
Toward a vision of a Field of Stars

Where free from sin and pain and blood and scars
He may at last find peace in that Field of Stars

Outside with the dogs for their night patrol
A bright flashlight for fear of wild winter wolves
Death-singing from the tree-line beyond the field -
My little dogs bark boldly, but stay close

They’re never permitted beyond the fence
That Hadrian’s Wall of doggylization
Through which they plot escape on sunny days
But not on this wolf-howling moonlit night

Better to have a chew-toy than to be one
So with them I close the door against the dark

Christmas Morning – Some Dissembling Required

Does the quiet magic disappear at dawn?
The Star, the stable, shepherds, wise men three
And all the mysteries of Christmas Eve
Seem less than vapor on bright Christmas Day

Among the litter of expectations
Cast happily about, and on the floor
The wrappings and ribbons of little gifts
Received and given around the festive tree

But every noisy moment reminds us:
The quiet magic never goes away

Waiting for our Masters to Grow Up

The barbarians who lord it over us
Thunder denunciations at each other
On whether they should kneel or stand to flags or *****
And with whom they should be photographed

Some swagger in government, in suits and ties
Some swagger with buckles binding their foreheads;
Like schoolboys they compare the size of their…purchases
And bubble themselves with fawning courtiers

As ever, we workers, savers, writers, readers
Must be the grownups - unlike our leaders

(What Would Woody Guthrie Say?)

My stuff is my stuff, your stuff is my stuff
From your post-hole diggers to that nice pry bar
From your leaf blower to your garden rake
Your stuff – it now belongs to me

While I was climbing
Your backyard fence
I saw your bolt-cutters
Don’t take offense

But you are rich
(You’ve got a job)
I’m sharing your wealth
(I don’t really rob)

My stuff is my stuff, your stuff is my stuff
From the real long power cord to that full tool box
From your brand new shovel to your socket set
Your stuff – it now belongs to me

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                    Maslow’s Hierarchy of Nerds

Okay, I’m the nerd, not part of the hierarchy
But you are core of my hierarchy of needs
Where do I place you on the pyramid?
But I don’t place you at all – you are

You are a hierarchy of, well, you:
‘Way up around self-actualization
And definitely among belonging and love
And the base, and the peak, and the center -

You are my hierarchy of truth
You are my pyramid of love

I mean, like, veg, you couldn’t expect me to eat
A fellow vegetable, a kindred soul
One in spirit with me, with woody cells
Made in the image of the Great Carrot

The animals don’t feel pain like we do
They have no sense of being, they have no soul
And humans need to be farm-raised in pens
And really, veg, they’re happier that way

I’m studied in all such matters agrarian
And, yum! I love me a tasty vegetarian!

“Ransomware Cripples Cities”

                            -a common headline

Ransomware never crippled an Olivetti
But a broken spring did so once or twice
So I carried the old machine to old Bill
Whose magic always made it fly again

Ransomware never crippled a cardboard file
Nor yet the flyleaf of the book in which
She wrote the kindest sentiment of love
In the sweet optimism of our youth

Ransomware never crippled who we were -
I did that to us when I walked away

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                 A Dollar Box of Crayolas®™

I wanted the biggest box of Crayolas
I had to have the biggest box of Crayolas
I could build worlds with the biggest box of Crayolas
I needed that biggest box of Crayolas!

But the wise voice of situational poverty spoke:
“I am not spending a dollar on a box of Crayolas.”

The biggest box of Crayolas is now about four dollars
Allowing for inflation, much cheaper than in ‘55
I should go buy the biggest box of Crayolas
Maybe I can find a Big Chief Tablet®™ to go with it

Saint Blaise

Waiting in line to have body parts blessed
Is probably a good idea, and throats
Are more accessible than pancreases
(Or are they pancreai?). A brain-blessing

Might be an even better idea, although
A small priest could not, would not reach so high
Hands, shoulders, elbows, noses, ear lobes too
So in the end (but blessing that might be

Entirely inappropriate) you see

Even so

Let us be blessed in all humility

Fat Confederates in Camouflage Knee-Pants

General Robert E. Lee in in a slogan tee -
One cannot imagine such, nor yet
**** Dowling defending old Galveston
Armed with made-in-China tiki torches

Doctor Martin Luther King adorned in bling -
One cannot imagine such, nor yet
The Little Rock Nine disfigured with tats
Or freedom marchers sporting designer sneaks

So, all you goofs and oafs and slobs and yobs,
Get out of the way; go find yourselves jobs

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                DaddyPaw’s Letters from the CCC Camp

           For George (“DaddyPaw”) Hargrove, Hebo Ogden Hall,
And all Who Served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933 - 1942

He found his DaddyPaw’s young adulthood
In a box of letters from New Mexico
About fighting forest fires and building fence
To the stockyards at Magdalena

“The peas must be coming in by now,” he writes
“Are yall getting enough to eat? How’s my dog?
I’ve got swell friends but I sure wish I was home.
And did yall get the five dollars I sent?”

We stand in reverence of a generation
Who almost never had enough to eat

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                              I Envision a World...

I envision a world in which the death penalty
Is never again
Used against woman or man
Except for journalists who write “iconic”
(For them old Socrates’ hemlock tonic)
And poets who write “cerulean”
(And for them the serpents that stung St. Julian)

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                        Daily Writing Discipline

My self-appointed duty is to write a line or two
Each day, no matter how busy I have been
But today at work I thought of little except you
And how your name is a verse upon the wind

Doing the household laundry is rather fun
The old roundy-go-thump washing machine
Roundy-go-thumps in time to the dishwasher
While the electric dryer waits patiently

Someday I will have a clothesline again
And summer days and summer sun will love
My shirts and towels so sweetly dry that they
Will want to fly away on the summer breeze

And when the clothes have been folded away
The sun will want to come inside to play

Enough of gossamer!  Enough of it!
It’s just another word for spider ////!

Bands of Rain

The radar shows them as spiraling lunettes;
Here on the ground only rain, and then not
And then again, pale rain. The air is green,
The leaves are still, and heavy with the damp

The hurricane is far away, and yet
Its tentacles search out with menacing winds
And hidden tornados pursuivant
Poor refugees from its transient rule

And now another band, beating the walls
With hideous fury as another night falls

The 1970s

A giant Hannibalian elephant
Descending from the alps slowly to die
In the valley of the Po, pricked about
Bellowing outrage in its agonies

Of leisure suits and suburban barbed wire
Recorded on minutes of missing tapes
As polyester doubleknits await
A bump-up in the daily gasoline line

Hubris rotting in the dust of the age
And did you hear they’ve raised the minimum wage?

Setting the Night Watch

Nature exists without anyone’s permission:
At dusk the loud cicadas in the oaks
And the soft crickets dwelling in the grass
Sing an evening hymn to the setting sun

Sparrows and mockingbirds leave off their wars
And all make wing to Shakespeare’s rooky wood
While little dogs patter the day’s last patrol
Snuffling the bounds as true as timber wolves

And as a tourist comes a straying man
Oblivious to the changing of the watch

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                    Texas, Our Texas, All Hail the Secret State

            "The Biden administration is not being transparent…”

                                     -Governor Greg Abbot

Governor Abbot so loves his Texas folk
That he orders state troopers to keep them away
He surrounds himself with a security cloak
And with his good ol’ boys, the ones who pay

God forbid that the people who voted for him
Should forget their place, and dare to approach
The corporate hangar guarded against them
And risk his Praetorians’ stern reproach

Even the press is locked out, alone and lonely –

             The government of Texas is for Members Only

Whispered voices adrift about the house
The little cousins all sent out to play
Adults ingathered at the kitchen table
Taking communion from the coffee ***

The hospice nurse is in and out and back
A subtle shake of her head – he’s still alive
In the back bedroom, gurgling to an end
Frail fingers twitching on the coverlet

An evening of grieving, darkening fast
Whispered voices adrift about the past

The Man Born Blind

We are all born blind, and stumble through our lives
In darkness lost along the River Styx
While clinging to our long-accustomed fear
As if it were a rule to be obeyed

The light is offered, then usually denied
As if it were yet another cruel joke
Long promised and then suddenly yanked away
More lost hopes rotting among the mouldering leaves

For some the obscure is more comfortable
Than promised light that never seems to shine

Civilization Requires a Little Effort

Upon reading Amon Towles’
A Gentleman in Moscow

Civilization requires a little effort
Ties must be knotted correctly, shoes must be polished
Cuffs must be linked, but not at all gaudily -
Elegant understatement at all times

On every occasion say “Thank you” and “please”
When addressing a lady one’s hat is off
And if tomorrow they are going to shoot you
Or beat you to death in a re-named street  

Do comb your hair, and try to stand up straight
Civilization requires a little effort

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                 After Momma’s Funeral

Three Voices:

Where does – I mean, did – Momma keep the coffee?
That cupboard over the coffee maker
The preacher prayed a fine funeral for her
He’s an idiot; no one believes that stuff

Momma did; I say that’s what important
Let’s not argue; Momma wouldn’t like it
It doesn’t make any difference; she’s gone
And let’s not babble about what Momma wants

I’m not babbling; Momma raised us right, okay?
I want her Bible.
                                   Fine; I want her car

When streaming rain obscures your window pane
You want to be alone, among your thoughts
And no one knows exactly why that’s so
But yes, you are at peace this afternoon

They say the falling barometric pressure
Makes you sleepy, but the rain knows better
The drowsing rain, it wants to sing to you
And tuck you softly into a dream of love

So close your eyes, and as the little book slips
Onto your lap, the rain sighs with your lips

Why don’t the Portuguese have their own main?
Errol Flynn fights only Spanish baddies
Who twirl their moustaches in sneering disdain
And the villains are never Portuguese ladies

When ships do battle on Warner’s sound stage
The English are haughty, the Spanish snooty
Prince Henry’s brave men are never the rage
And the heroine is never a Lisboan beauty

Harken unto this repeated refrain:
Why don’t the Portuguese have their own main?

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                    D­ressers of Sycamores

                 “I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamores”

                                          -Amos 7:14

Amos speaks blunt truth in humility
And being commanded from the fields to the roads
To remind us of our duties to God and His People
Is a disruption, not a promotion

We all dress sycamores in our own ways:
Carrying groceries, tending the sick
Plowing a field, repairing a broken truck
Mending a fence, taking a child to school

We should listen to Amos and to ourselves
For our service is noble if for the King

Come, little book, companion of lost youth
Well met at Tien Sha in the long ago
A comrade through the days of gasping heat
A comrade through the nights of flare-lit death

And then

A comrade through life’s lingering after-years
That often seemed only a falling away
From that not time which was lost in not time
The fallenness of man and men and time

O little book that steadies the universe
Where are you now – not lost out of not time?



Too much exposition:

At a Pacific Stars & Stripes book stall in Viet-Nam I bought a Modern Library edition of The Brothers Karamazov which I stowed away with my gear and on which I read a little; I was much more into Tolkien. In the event, more than a year later (I was in-country 18 months) I opened that book aboard a Pan American 707, but was so grateful to be alive and so physically sick that I never read more than a page or so.  I didn’t finish the book until years later, but have re-read it several times since.  

Somehow I have lost it, and although my wonderful daughter gave me a replacement (in larger print), I so miss that companion of the long-ago.

For Ngo Dinh Diem

No flame eternal burns over your lost grave
Unknown beneath an hourly parking lot
Or maybe out back among the garbage cans
No guards of honor pace in mirrored boots

Forth and back in mummery choreographed
Along a field of honor’s concrete walk
No busloads of tourists leave gift-shop wreaths
No bands or speeches mark your martyrdom

Nor would you need them
Nor would you want them

For your small flame is on an Altar set

Air Raid

Wings
Extended for the angle of attack,
The predator powers into his dive
And falls upon his target just as dawn
Lights up the scene and drives away the mist.
The mockingbird launches himself into
And through the air defenses of the cat,
Who claws the air with furious, futile strokes
As the eternally insolent enemy
Sweeps back triumphantly into the sky,
A looted dog-food pellet beak-pinched away.

The dog
Is unimpressed, and so resumes her sleep.

Sängerhalle für Kinder

A happy child with sunlight in her hair
Joyfully shrieking her own *An Die Freude
Splashes her friends with water and mud and fun
And they, as happily, splash in reply

The children assemble in a muddy creek
Instead of the Sangerhalle at Die Wartburg
Not making revolution, but childhood songs
Manifestos of freedom to fling about

The forest, then, is their true singers’ hall
A celebration of innocence for children all

Reclining **** with Pet Frog

Hobby Lobby got caught smuggling artifacts
Vaticanos got caught snuggling each other
Putin and Trump are loose with their facts
The governor of New Jersey is BIG Brother

The Republicans blame the Democrats
The Democrats blame the Russians
The Russians blame the plutocrats
And the Norks won’t join the discussions

All of them make big messes every day
And they expect us to shut up and pay

Until this morning my daughter was safe
For so the city said
But the waters rose, slithering up her stairs
And still the city said she was safe

She was evacuated, first by canoe
Then by an air-boat
Then by a dump truck

She and another evacuee laughed in the rain:
“Now we are the people they take pictures of”

Then by a bus

To a center at Saint Martha’s Church and School
Where someone said she would be bussed again
This time to downtown Houston, for reasons
Best known to some stupid * of a *

Her friend’s husband with his big ol’ pickup
Worked around barriers and through high water
And they escaped up the road to Willis, Texas
Tomorrow I will be honored to shake his hand

Long ago, when she left home, I promised
That an old man and two little dachshunds
Would wait for her.  I’m even older now
With grand-dachshunds  – but we said we would wait

And we have

Best I can do at the moment
Tears of gratitude
*Deo gratias

A pair of slacks, a pair of shoes, a shirt
A watch to count the weary meeting hours
Coffee with comrades in the old church hall
And all of these are very good indeed

But like old shoes, old pals, the scenes of youth
We must someday let them all go, and pass
Peacefully, one prays, through the spray and foam
And sail until dawn to that farthest Shore

Where only the NCOs must dress right, dress
And the coffee’s always fresh in the company mess


(But will the smoking lamp will be lit?)

Love and the Sunday Funnies

We will not turn on the radio today
We will repudiate its veto over us
We will silence its news and its noise
We will not wait upon its appointed hours

We will sit in the windowlight and read
Maybe the Great Books, or maybe the funnies
-The funnies!
Let’s read the funnies to each other, and laugh
About Charlie Brown and his kite-eating tree

And joyfully fling the funnies and ourselves
Upon the sunbeams, all over the floor

Llano Estacado

Escarpments and grasses forever and ever
Alive beneath the grey forever-sky,
Creation tumbling ancient elements
Into horizons upon more horizons,
Deep silences, from when there were no worlds,
Seldom interrupted, even by the nations.
The dawn wind sings a circle of low stones
A palace long before Coyote came,
The evening wind sighs through a picture rock
A language that was old when the moon was new.
A little crucifix bought in a shop
Near a wharf in Spain, and blessed by a priest
In haste for breakfast after early Mass
Lies near a fragment of a horseman’s boot
Above an arrowhead knapped from traded flint
Below a broken blade from a pocket knife
And a doll’s head torn by a very bad boy
Along a railway that follows buffalo
Not far from the historical marker
Where a pizza box leans against a fence.
But here on the Llano Estacado
Escarpments and grasses forever and ever