On the theme of Your Very Flesh
HENRY WAGGER
Old man Wagger slept in a tree.
He laughed at wasps. He owned a river road.
His daughter chased drunks from his orchard.
He said: squeeze the trigger, don’t chase.
Old man Wagger dreamed like a wall.
Planets could steal. Blackbirds could drag the world.
His first wife poured all the wine in the fire.
The new wife slowed the land.
Old man Wagger feared us alive.
Jets shook a parrot in a cage. An apron burned.
The neighbors worked at him and took his mind.
I see the wife at his skull, reading trees.
JEROME HAWBY
Jerome dug into a burnt stump where a bent nail looked like a coin
that he dreamed could buy a shadow. The shadow burned and burned
against the nail, and then across his left eye, so that his mind fell
into a sunrise with all the worlds tricked loose, a sleeping army far away,
a chopper in a marsh, some gods folded wildly into the lights and walls
where his father must have vanished before Jerome was born.
He hooked the nail into his key chain. It was a rusty life too near
spelled with his mother’s voice, and it slipped into his dreams again
where the metal was forged, where the iron deep-cooled, where
the hammer stared into a pine tree, where an old man owned cattle,
where a young woman screamed and birthed him. His poems
were sunk into a wooden sky with the nail and its splotchy summers
shocked into words. There were frets on a guitar in one dream,
the strings cut into his fingers, they moved into the chords with his blood.
He was Jerome Hawby, and an audience howled through his shadow.
Author Biography
Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia. He is a member of Blue Ridge Discovery Center, and environmental and natural history education organization in southwest Virginia and western North Carolina.