Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
Poetry from Oklahoma
for Kelly
In the ravine west of Grade School Hill,
We discovered a 5-gallon whiskey bottle,
Ridiculous brown totem, impossible giant,
Lying in the leaves behind a wooden shack
Of a house. She cleaned it up and it became
Her piggy bank, stuffed through the years
With pennies and quarters. Unscrewing the lid
Produced the smell of copper, the faint remains Continue reading “The Sister You Imagine”
Reconcile: from the Latin reconciliare (to bring together again), from re (again) + conciliare (to make friendly, conciliate)
Dead grasses hide the cityscape.
Death becomes life becomes
A continual process we forget
because we are all about now,
all about the waters poured
into us from birth, our own water
no longer the sea that shapes us. Continue reading “Reconciliation”
An absence of darkness that runs through light,
The shape of a second thought borne on dreams,
The tailwind of the world’s desire breathes
Its tortured wisdom into the dead land
Whose birth is easing out winter’s decay
With the slime of greenness more scapegoated
Than mortality. She runs, she pants, she Continue reading “Artemis”
The ravine is littered with fallen branches
From elm trees refusing to become corpses,
With the crumpled bark of sycamore
And the decaying cedar that crackles
Like popcorn when you put it into the fire.
Beat your chest, lover, and summon the gods
Who made you to gloat upon your power,
Your camouflaged care, your with-one-paper
Kindling responding to the placement
By intentional hands, bringing me beauty. Continue reading “What Remains”
for Mom
Stories are a part of my life because of her.
They are a part of everyone’s life but not so vividly,
Nor so intimately, as they are in my life
Because she valued story and books and poems.
We took the station wagon to the Pryor Public Library
Once a week and walked out, each of us, with a pile
Of books we could barely carry. They spread
Through our house like amoeba, like fleas, like waters
Unleashed in a basin needing to be filled. She knew
The head librarian, so we could break the rules
And check out forty books at a time, forty books
That would live in us for a week in that house
On the creek, in that place where our stories thrived. Continue reading “Where I Come From”
The catfish are the Bozos of the bottom,
Blundering from ledges, bumping into me,
Their whiskers slashing my skirt into circus pennants.
Their heads are rocks split across the middle,
Mouths opening slowly as if levered.
They are ugly and regal and harmless,
Even when I forget where I am and startle them
By lifting the sword from the sand
And sending it to the surface before me.
The bass scatter. I speared one once. Continue reading “In the Lake”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 