They were fifteen and smoked Lucky Strikes
on the train to Tulsa. Both wore their best dress.
Montie Jean’s was blue taffeta with lace
crocheted along the collar. She had to stand
or stroll to keep it from creasing at her hips. Continue reading “Spring Train”
Tag: Oklahoma
Frost’s Forest in Your Head
On this day, March 7, in 1923, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was published by the New Republic. This poem is one of the first that I set to memory. I carry it with me everywhere I go.
I carry its emptiness through my busy, busy days. The little horse shaking its harness bells is such a quiet sound in the midst of the teenage voices and car engines and noise of TV and computer that fill my days.
The “easy wind and downy flake” are suspended in my bones while I try to shut the car door against the southern Oklahoma wind and grab for my sunglasses in the stark light of the day.
I pass a slew of abandoned farmhouses on my way to work each morning but none seem as quiet, as lyrical, as lonely as the one that is not even near on that “darkest evening of the year.”
The death wish that some people say Frost’s poetry contains is always present with life. In the midst of life, we are . . . and so it goes (as Vonnegut would say). This poem about wanting to sleep in the dark and deep woods is the network of veins under our skin.
The blood is our desire to go another mile, just one more mile, before we sleep. Thank you, Robert Frost, for the gift of your forest that fills my life.
–Shaun Perkins
Eating the World
The wind lifted me from the concrete,
and I bobbed safely down the hill,
my toes glancing through the green grass
as Sally Field’s hat shepherded the breeze.
If I cut through the park on my way downtown,
I passed the Indian boy’s house–Jon-Jon,
now upright in the valley like the burnt
stump of a oak felled for firewood. Continue reading “Eating the World”
The Killdeer
We stopped the white Chevy with the rusted tailgate,
Half in the ditch, and walked up the hillside,
Through the pine trees and scrub oak, fall leaves
Like letters in an abandoned apartment cracking
Under our feet. There was nothing and everything
To see in the woods, the snake skin, coyote scat,
Half-hidden killdeer nest, muddy water of the hollow.
He pointed these things out to me, a child learning
to see from her father. We all learn
To see from the people who came before us. Continue reading “The Killdeer”
Working at the Tom Mix Museum
The big white hat has grayed in its case,
Next to 2-inch spiked spurs banned even then
And dried-up lassos and embroidered leather gloves
That would disintegrate if taken out of display.
The suitcases of death are stacked beside a saddle
With the TM logo stamped on the side.
The shiny metal cases have a few dents in them,
Perhaps one in the shape of his head,
As the case flew forward when his convertible crashed.
While the West disappeared around him,
He died on the side of the road, tossed
From a vehicle he would never learn to master.
–Shaun Perkins
Stubborn: Poem for the New Year
I am the blackjack oak
protecting herself
with a 2nd set of leaves.
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 