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spysgrandson Jan 2017
though she sat only two
pews farther back, her understanding
of things was different from his  

she imagined the body of the woman
in the casket in quiet, pacific repose, spirit departed,
welcomed already in some beaming crystal sky  

he saw red lips painted on
a powdered white face--eyelids invisibly
sewn shut over empty sockets  

for he heard the big people say
she had donated her corneas, and someone
told him what those were  

she believed, as she had been told,
the woman would suffer no more, and live forever
in a place surrounded by benevolent ghosts    

he did not understand how this thing
called soul could be so hasty in leaving a body
where it had lived for eighty years  

he had watched water drain from a tub  
and smoke from fires leave stone chimneys
and long hang gray in white skies  

she had seen the same, but when it came
to this strange thing called death, the word
she heard conjured magic, not tragic  

he only knew Daddy was not smiling,
and Mommy’s eyes were dripping tears; not one
person in the big room laughed or played    

except for the girl two pews back  
who brushed a doll’s hair and spoke to it
as if it could hear
Saturday morning is a time for seeing things as children do
spysgrandson Jan 2017
he took the cliche sabbatical
when his wife died, careening through
the Rockies to the jagged Pacific coast,
seeing old lovers along the way

ending in Iowa
with his daughter's family:
flat lands, with no ups and downs
surprise turns, or fatal strokes

there the grief was level
his daughter of strong faith
his granddaughter young enough
to yet see heaven in blue sky

mornings after Cheerios
she would lead him around the section
edifying him about the livestock, their purpose;
she introduced him to Harriet

her pet pig;
he couldn't help but think of his Hazel
and if the consonant and vowel were coincidental
or a contrivance of a child's supple mind

his granddaughter spoke of Hazel
with sublime ease, absent the halting
staccato utterances of adults when
they mentioned his wife's name

after all, his grandchild saw her
in a passing cloud, or in the glint
of moonlight on the pond,  
in clear azure sky

soon it came time to say goodbye
to the hog, who had been with the child
a sixth of her years--but she knew this
was the way of things

feeding and fondling new things
watching them grow, becoming cautious
when their mass exceeded your own
when they began to look away

'twas then it was time
all God's creatures would lose footing
even in this flat place,
and go to sleep

though the child would not forget
Hazel or Harriet, for the latter was on the table,
sizzling and succulent, the former on the mantel,
framed in gold, smiling with eyes open
spysgrandson Jan 2017
one gallon,
31 miles or so the EPA
guesstimated--163,680 feet
54,560 steps if he walked

he avoided
the major "arteries"
damnable euphemisms
for interstates

for what lifeblood
did they carry and what
did one see at 110 feet a second
1.25 miles a minute

at mile 3,
he spotted a cur crossing
the asphalt, or perhaps it was a coyote;
and until mile 12 he wondered

why he wanted to know where it had
come from, rather than where it was going,
because aren't road trips about getting
somewhere?

at mile 15, he saw a farmhouse
abandoned before time--or maybe when
a feeble old man died on a sagging bed
the month after he put his wife
in the cold ground

and told his progeny if their homestead
was good enough to bring them into the world,
and for her to depart, it was fine enough
for him to do the same

at mile 21, he traversed a bridge
over Red Bluff Creek, and he knew
there wasn't a bluff within a hundred miles;
perhaps it was got its colored calling, after
a poker player named Red, known
for his bluffing

at mile 30, he had a blowout;
no, he didn't careen off the old road
into a ditch, but slowly rolled to an impotent stop
atop the only hill in 50 miles

a man in overalls with an ancient pick up
stopped and offered aid in a drawl thick enough
to slow time; together they put on the donut
from the trunk--the man wouldn't take a ten
but said take care

and our traveler decided his helper
had to have been kin to the old man
in the abandoned shack, and perhaps he had
been there in the end, watching the wheel spin
on a tick tock clock, noting the precise minute
the old man passed--to write this time
in a family bible

because that is how it should be
of all those things he would see--beasts going
nowhere, mythic rivers from everywhere, and behind
ghost painted walls, men dying, men whose  
sons would stop to render aid to strangers
and help conjure the imagined tales
infinitely available of a gallon
of fossil fuel
a couch tale--written on my phone, reclining on my sofa, far from the open road
spysgrandson Jan 2017
deep in the warren
they feel safe from the treachery
of my carnivorous calling

but I can use the shovel,
that terrible tool of modernity--after all,
'tis a favorite of grave diggers

a few scoops in the dank soil
and the rabbits are vulnerable to my attack:
a simple bashing of twitching skulls

my hands driven by a hunger
they satisfy with grasses in summer,
twigs, roots in winter

I wish my needs were so meager
my appetite so abstemious--but I crave
blood fresh flesh, torn from the bone

without their sacrifice, I must seek
bigger beasts, long dead, cellophane sealed
and put on ****** display

or become a vegan and ground great grains,
boil lazy legumes, and feign a higher nobility
in what I eat and excrete
no offense intended to vegetarians, or rabbits
spysgrandson Jan 2017
others in the ****** ascended
to their white, breathing heavens
one by one, as if saying goodbye,
to them, was a solitary act

leaving him alone,
on the high branch--he did not fall
when gusts shook the oak, though
during stillness, he dropped

to the next leafless limb,
there waiting for him patiently,
drenched in sunlight that made
the crow's coat glisten  

soon clouds blocked the sun,
downdrafts pounded the tree;
he did not fall, until
the skies cleared    

then, to the lowest limb
he descended, now but feet above
a blanket of leaves, soon
to be his bed

other creatures would come, communing
with him in their way: his flesh becoming
their flesh, a sacred chemistry for all life,
after its pitiless descent to death
spysgrandson Dec 2016
two of them came in from the night
into the neon light of a 7-11, where they found her
behind the counter, guarding  
the register's cash

with her life
which they took, because, after her trembling hand
handed them $138, one of them, "just freaked"
when he saw her face

and then shot her, in her throat,
and again between two holy *******,
after she landed on the linoleum floor,
12 feet 3 inches from the door

through which they returned to the night,
though only long enough to find the Whataburger
exactly one mad mile away, where they stopped
because the shooter was hungry

he ordered a number one, with cheese
but his accomplice had no appetite--he asked
for coffee, black, and used coins (not stolen)
he had to pay

when they confessed to the killing
even the accomplice found it chilling, the shooter
could eat red flesh and fresh hot fries, while scalding coffee
was all his partner could abide
Based on a true story from 1990. The tale was told to me, after their conviction and sentencing, by a student I counseled. He informed me the killer confessed this to him the night of the event. The victim was a mother in her thirties with whom my wife had attended high school.
spysgrandson Dec 2016
every night, before bed,
a simple ritual: he walks to the foyer
and drags the deacon's bench to the door
to keep intruders at bay

has been this way, since
the day he read "In Cold Blood"
and realized what uninvited guests
can do under a god's watchful eye

the belly of the bench holds every bible  
he has ever owned in his four score years
save the one by his bedside, where it sits as sentinel
against other imagined foes and woes  

though he is long deaf, those
who would defile him can yet hear, and
the righteous moan of the bench on the hardwood
would give them pause

or so the old man believes;
as if a simple sound could be so profound
to tip cosmic scales in his favor, save him
from the tyranny of evil men

this very night, before bed
he takes the same walk, shoves the same  
weighted wood against a locked door,
a simple ritual
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