May 20, 2019
Three Poems
By CL Bledsoe
My Brother Is Getting Old
I wanted to ask what stole the brown
from his beard, painted his thinning
hair gray, stooped him over when he tries
to stand? Was it the same bastard who
stole my spare time and made my knees
hurt? But he always wants to talk
when I call so I don’t. I told Barbara
about it at the coffee shop, said I’m dull
and old but my heart is busy. I practiced
the line for fifteen minutes but she wouldn’t
stop crying after they called her name.
I finally asked her what was wrong.
She said just being a woman. We were walking
away, then, a line of eyes a few feet
behind us. It must be hard to be invisible
but always stared at, I said, but the light
had changed. She had already crossed. I
was alone and heading the wrong way.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rice Field
after Wallace Stevens
1. The levees are low walls. I stepped
over, but I still see mud
in my tracks all these years later.
2. Dragonflies hover over the feast,
like the helicopter Uncle Wheelbarrow stole,
set down in a rice field drunk
and hurting.
3. It’s not water; it’s the sweat
of generations from which grows
a momentary cessation of the banker’s hostility.
4. A soft smell something like sweet
straw and mud,
a mother’s hair.
5. Driving to college on a lonely highway,
levees race to catch up.
6. Blackbirds laugh from power lines
by the road as we trudge into the mud,
half-a-dozen spills and a shovel
on our shoulders.
7. Up on the high dirt road, somebody’s
truck eases to a stop to wait until we’re done.
8. My father took my fiancé on a tour of the rice
fields and told her, “Didn’t know
you were marrying into landed gentry,
did you?”
9. The wind pushes flames across
the stubbled dirt. I watch
from the road, yearning for something
I can’t name.
10. Weeds grow inside an old farmhouse.
A rusted bedframe just visible
through the window hole.
11. When mom got too sick to stay home,
they put her in a nursing home built where
we used to farm.
12. Dad would wade out with a shoulder
full of spills and a shovel in a hundred degree
heat, patch the levees that needed it and cut
others, then back at the truck, down
a Budweiser like it was water.
13. Mosquitoes nudge ears, nose, mouth,
the wind’s reminder: yes, there is life in us,
if only we can get it out.
Seining
It’ll suck you in if you slow
down. Each step, a throaty
release of rubber coming free
of deep mud. A line of men pulling
a net across the darkness
to gather catfish, buffalo fish.
Toss the mudcats on the shore
where the dumpgulls wait.
I was afraid if I stepped in,
I’d never get free.
CL Bledsoe’s most recent poetry collections are Trashcans in Love and The King of Loneliness. His most recently short story collection is The Shower Fixture Played the Blues. He lives in northern Virginia, with his daughter, and blogs, with Michael Gushue, and https://medium.com/@howtoeven