AFIELD

Something old to fondle, Osage
fruits, the stooping

transplants—my brother & I threw 'em
I-275
eastbound oranges, sky chopper traffic

Semis kicked hedge-apples interstate
into fences where the sycamores

slough their skins, the retro-
grade bluegrass
stored in Mason

& the milky planets
Bisquick & Kellogg's variety packs

such green children
sweet blister corn, reentry

WANDERING OF LIGHT

You graze me, purple star
sad blood sack
you dead End

Nebula

plastic-bag-pinched
I drop you in a can
oblate

look up at heedless
the headlights half-decimate

moon, Jupiter

I was sad when the Hyphen
said unto me
go up into the House

of the Interpreter

____

"Afield" began as a memory of my brother and I throwing hedge-apples (Osage oranges) onto the highway behind my grandmother’s house. There is a certain danger and recklessness about this act that strikes me as typical of adolescents. My memory, like the hedge-apples, goes afield and retrieves other images, including commercial products, such as Bisquick and Kellogg's cereal, that are as permanent (and vivid) in my imagination as the sycamores, the semis, the Mason jars, the corn, and the helicopter reporting traffic problems on the expressway. This collage of images is transplanted from my past and reenters rather intensely into the atmosphere of the present.

"Wandering of Light," oddly enough, came to me when I found a dead squirrel by my mailbox, which I picked up with a plastic bag and threw into the garbage can. It was a spectacular starry night in Georgia, and I began to associate this little, blood-filled corpse with the stars and nebulae overhead—full of light but soon to burn out. From there, it was relatively easy for me to jump into the abstract and meditate on the luminous, elliptical, squashed nature of life, which invites interpretation yet also loses something when interpreted.