3 P.M.
Toiling, tolling on a
blistering day,
shadows poking their noses
where they
don’t belong, patch of
burley a furnace.
Lamp green fountains at
parade rest out past
the wind break. Strange, bells in the yawn
between dinner time and
supper time,
Henderson Chapel dozing
mute in the
oxbow of the Little
Pigeon River,
topping knife gnawing a
memory
in the tender palm of
your hand.
Fort McPherson filtered
through piney
woods, a livid rash on red Georgia clay,
caking your boots
coating your tongue sucking
last sweet drops of
marrow from boyhoods
rib bone. Bells?
On a rifle range? slicing
through cold drenching
rain, needling spittle
from bellicose sergeants
pretending
not to hear plaintive peels
between cracking
Garand’s, sagging paper
target a stand
in for some farm boy
from Hokkaido.
Solemn chimes riming
rackety chatter
from the CB radio,
prickling your
neck, limning the
approach of something
roused dowsing for a
heartbeat down the line.
West Virginia three-way
split, fresh gash
in a runaway truck ramp
oozes odds in
your favor so
pedal-to-the-metal.
Youngstown by midnight,
hint of actinic
keratosis riding
shotgun on your
sunny window arm,
clinging for its life.
Seventy-one
Thanksgivings seventy-one
heaping helpings not to
mention seconds.
“Another piece of
pumpkin pie?” well why
the hell not? After all, I mean, you know,
considering. L Tryptophan might
explain the tears but
those confounded
bells, drowning out the
ones you begat
reading In The Night Kitchen on the sofa
for the seventy-first
consecutive
time, across the room
yet miles away.
Tolling, tolling, warm
for late December,
leaden sea laden air keeps
to the coasts.
Too late to make the
early buffet in
Kissimmee, metallic din
a swelling
companion piece to the final
flutterings
of a broken finch flagging
against its
cage. Scale a ladder just shy of 3 p.m.
so like you, an early
exit to beat
the traffic. One last look, it tolls for you
sweetly, sweetly like
the Bells of Rhymney.
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