| Issue 3:1 | Poetry | Clyde Kessler |
6 Poems
by Clyde Kessler
On A Train In Gauley Long
Ago
Maybe I slept on this train
all winter,
and the coal burned my lungs
in a dream,
maybe the steam looked like
one god
peeled from a trough. What if I was just born
or was I hibernating? I could hear something
like all the world’s
mountains sprouting with stars.
I could hear stray dogs
yowling along the track.
I waited in Gauley with my
parents,
I dreamed my ancestors
dawdled along a ridge
with the moonlight and the
owls and the dogwoods
and a wild swig of smoky
whiskey for heaven.
But I never woke there
again: I was riding
and riding a train that
stalled with its ghosts,
the March weeds, the most
unknowable worlds,
a few broken clocks, a
sparrow’s nest, a spider’s egg,
an impossible house whittled
from a shadow,
a wide field hobbled to a
road with most every silence,
the sun itself pebbled into
a cry above everything.
Nebuchenezzar
The hills were young and
weedy,
a red cattle grazed the
broom sedge,
walked into a cloud as if
their winter
had gathered everything in
one place,
had called them with a
farmer’s word
that hid them home. I was so fooled
with the morning, I stole
the dirt,
I craned into the fence with
five crows
well wired and dead. I was laughing.
The cloud said: the cattle
will ride
a slow train of the stars
before it rains,
before the world comes back
to its own,
before a cold spring rises
for drinking
and dancing and being
born. I was waking,
and all the cedars of
Lebanon shrugged into stone.
Renny Tate
Renny Tate walked like a
dead dog,
drank a cold coffee lace at
the church door,
smiled through his
shoes. Some crows
kept scratching and eating
the corn seed
so he fed them more and
stuck gravestones
in the field, saying his
farm was all killed
right there. Every midnight, his mind
was thinner than a spider’s
voice, milking
the dark earth, crawling,
stretching, hiding,
not knowing who or what he
was. His one boy
chanted and stared. His wife was dead.
He thought there should be a
clown jabbing
paper planes down the chimney,
the body all
crumpled with stars, and
laughing.
Ruby Cribb
I saw a ghost once.
It walked through
a painting of children
in a paddle boat
on Fairystone Lake.
It was quite near
and mouthing its words
like an old woman
whose voice
is a mirror and nothing.
I could not tell you the
orbit,
the wheeling of its
shadow.
It climbed through my hands.
It caught the sunset drapes
and turned. There was
a glistening arm held
like straw. I almost reached
towards it then. It was
like an insect in a bottle,
jittery, sliding. Maybe
its face was an owl’s face.
Then it began leaving our
cabin.
It shimmered away. I could not
laugh or say what the soul
was.
I drank some hot tea. I sat
on the back porch and
watched
your two dogs, your plow
horse,
the land of your fathers,
the oaks,
the strange, twisting ridge
that always woke me towards
fear.
When you drove back from
town,
I had dinner ready. The ghost
was gone, and I wished its
disappearance was my own.
Train
It
keeps the swerve of a coal seam
exposed at midnight, hauling
itself away
through the valley,
whistling the fog,
waking me to hear its slow
grinding wheels
tunneling through Radford,
steely and blind
across a trestle.
Visions
I hear the fire in winter,
a soft field melting towards
its own children,
an easy, early flower caught
against the stars.
Is it the one riddle of the
season
unasked and still taken
without words?
I play its heat in a sprig
of service-berry.
The sun moves with the
galaxy to its own.
The moon comes up, there is
the same land,
the same pulling, a slow
gravity
nudging the weeds. I don’t guess the place
is worth itself to know now,
with bombings
and soldiers spared nothing.
An abrupt world
steals its home from me,
what was once
brave and silent and
peaceable in the words.
