October 2022

Daddy’s blue-gray Chevy pickup
    bumped along the hard gravel road
        forking deeper into pines & oaks,

& then my boyish eyes ran up to the
    flickering wick of a kerosene lamp
        in the window of a small house half-

hidden on edge of a forever woods,
    the front porch leaning to the ground.
        This woman I’d never seen before,

granddaddy Gabel…

  Agnes only had nine years to live. The angels must have begun to hover around her canvas like monkeys. This canvas has nine white thin strips between the red and blue ones. I’ve spent my life thinking about the blue ones, thinking they were the future. But the future was red all along. I sense something is ending but I’m not sure…

The winds made me crazy.
At King’s Highway diner
I did tarot for the waitress
and she drew a heart on my bill.
Every day I watched a boy
play dead in the pool.
His friends laughed at him
from their beach chairs.
“I won,” he’d yell.
“I beat all of you again.”

When a stranger in a cowboy hat
asked if I was born in 1984
I didn’t answer…