Issue 4:1 I Poetry I Tim Peeler

Four Poems by Tim Peeler

Outlaw Poem

I am the mute that reads the river,

that spreads the map across the rocks

and listens to the hewing green water.

My childhood slipped bend to bend,

through cow-pied pastures, by bream ponds,

muddy breathless miles, forgotten murder scenes.

I watch for the girls that doffed at the mill,

fourteen, fifteen, a barefoot child on their hips,

never beautiful, wading below the dam.

Some days I mime a history,

a fresh liquid mystery, boys in

railroad caps on bicycles, crossing the dam.

Sometimes the river is a belly

scratching itself as it passes, waving under

wisteria, a sun-spotted moccasin.

Under the concrete bridge, an alphabet

gathers over shiny pebbles; catfish,

catfish, if I could only speak.

What it Means to Be an American

The gray rabbit skitters side to side

at the edge of the wet hay field, then

darts back into gnarled undergrowth.

Herefords and Angus no longer lawyer

up in clover and fescue by rusty fence,

bits of grain stuck in moist pink nostrils.

At night, the darkness bricks the meadow,

the disheveled barn burgled by moonlight

where old hay lies rotting in the musty loft.

No neurotic chickens stalk the yard;

no muddy hogs snort in the lot

behind the roofless woodshed.

This land waits for the next thing, the orange

ribboned right of way, surveyors' stakes,

the yellow metal prediction of bulldozers.

Hoe Boy Checks the Paint

The devil's comin' for your soul, Dean;

I saw you in the river of sky, wrinkled

and red, looking like Nixon or Poe.

Here above the dam, lightning spikes,

and I picked your Santa nose over

a rock; the bream are biting, they say,

but I don't believe it. Every whistled

song is a part of the whole song. I

remember that from a book, and

your tree is turning like the maples

at Moses Cone, blood on the church

floor where Hildebran shot his

escaped slave.  That kind of red

is what we have come to, Dean.

Hoe Boy's Death Poem

My cousin Alan is a grave,

his little sister, Julie too, in red

Rowan clay, golden leaves

tumbling from creepy oaks

into brittle fiery heaps.

The spin of this imperiled

ball, swallowed whole

by weather, dunked in fearful

endless slather gravity, matters

only my heart keeps me above.

Death was always the way

according to the phone call,

yet hardly a dropped dime

cooked in cranberry moonlight,

quiet as a snowflake on a tombstone.