My carved plank, in cloudland
For a Man Crying on the Shoulder of I-44
She still thinks of you: A careless affair long ago.
She tries not to picture you on the roadmap of her life,
But you are there, like a childhood scar—
Faded, only not so innocent.
The lies she told you, the betrayal—
These were not meant to hurt you.
The lies were anchor bolts
Securing her to the foundation of a family’s approval;
The betrayal—the house she built there,
With rooms for everyone except you.
That’s the story you’re sticking to, anyway.
You have recited it for twenty years—
Blood dripping from your wrists,
Drool in your whiskers and whiskey on your breath.
That crazed look is a funny kind of love,
At home in the dim light of truck stop bathrooms,
And the taillights of cars that don’t stop.
And you, wrapped in a dirty blanket
With your rest stop demons,
Smelling like nicotine and day-old piss—
Not even the Christians want to make you over.
A good scrub and a dip with their Lord
Won’t wash away your sin.
You’ve been carrying that empty bottle,
Broken in your pocket, for how long?
Now, get up. Forget what was lost.
Quit the hustle.
Quit the hitching.
Quit the bottle.
Quit the crying.
Quit the highway lies.
Wild Strawberries in Ozark County
We saw lightning take twenty feet
Off the top of a tree on a sunny day.
Saw a spring reverse flow,
Sucking water back into the ground.
Saw a bullet slow to a crawl,
Turned from the target by a bully June-bug.
Saw fireflies gather into a clump so bright
They lit the spirit of a dead boy
Right where he fell, trampled by a bull,
Grew weak, gangrenous and fought the coyotes.
That hilltop was like a raw nerve.
No kind of place to hatch a plan.
A handshake means nothing in a place like that.
Something to be broken, severed
Like the brutal tearing of the buzzard
Into the flesh of the not-quite-dead rabbit
Knocked to the roadside, still twitching
While an old woman with blue hair tunes the radio,
Humming a song about Jesus,
Her heart fluttering like a gentle dove’s,
Certain that nothing standing in the way
Of a heart so touched as hers
Could be of the Kingdom.
Which of us was which?
I used to have an answer.
In bitterness we author a rebuttal.
We play each part once or twice.
Then time tells us a truer story.
In the end, Cain and Abel were brothers.
The Twister
When the funnel put us down
Everyone was okay.
But a lot had changed.
It was a different car.
The people inside were different people.
They were nicer.
They offered me soda and pixie sticks.
They smiled and joked as they drove.
It was a nicer car, too.
A better ride.
I thought Hell, why not.
And I never looked back.
They had a bedroom all ready for me.
They said, this is your name.
I just went along with it.
The picture on the mantle
Looked quite a bit like me.
The clothes all fit.
Besides, there was a baseball glove,
A BB gun, a bass boat and season tickets.
No church on Sundays, either.
My real mom always used to say,
“Somewhere in the world
There's a little boy who looks just like you.”
Who knew he was in the same county.
Now she’s got him.
Poor kid.
Sin
The midweek sermon, delivered by your father
From a rotary phone in Kansas.
A storm gathered above the prairie,
Marshaled at the state line.
From there, it’s twenty-five miles to my bedroom,
Where I hold you in a way your father should never see.
Satiating things are sermon enough for us.
We’ve learned to divine from the storm.
Soaring, we push toward the azure horizon,
Away from this shameful town.
We offer no excuses.
Seek no absolution for what we do.
Your unbuttoned jeans.
My fingers tracing the tingling circuit.
Your father dials as lightning hits the line.
And we are connected with him in paradise.
Poems first appeared in Arkansas Literary Forum, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, Chiron Review, and Bad Rotten (Pudding House, 2004)
mhoerman@gmail.com
