Archives for August 2017

Take up our struggle to print books;
To you, from failing press we look.
Some cash? It’s yours, so spend it well.
If ye break fifteen grand, that’s swell!
We shall rejoice. By hook or crook
Shall Wiseblood last.

The gold of Mexico is at the airport, the sticks
Of Cortes in my basement. We are free

To call the words of wisdom what a fool
Would warn us against. Ignore the rusty hook.

I don’t farm and history is a field I walk
With icons and trinkets in hand, lures and bobs.

The grey coat of heather and haggard face of coal
Conspire patterns in acres of mud-born puddles…

The myth of the trout I never caught is the net
I never set. It pulses with muscles, gills, scales

And the rainbow memory of a river – caught
Instead. We could have never been friends —

I never learned to fish and Cancer dried out
Between the stinging constellations. Religion

Was kissing the claws of my secret cowardice,
Letting Christ off the hook and stilling the plow

While foolhardy farmers, who know better than me,
Take their tools to the city – asking,

“Where’s the rain?” The hawk and wolf ask too,
And find their answer in the tombs

That false spring makes of fallen boughs
And rocks pushed around by thaw and freeze.

Blood between your teeth, you took wing one day,
Despite the rain, because of the blood,

And never looked down, not even once:
What Cortes had between the pages I’d never have.

What Montezuma wanted, crossed sticks
And shiny stones and savannahs spreading out

Beneath us, I could never break.
But the river broke the trout that broke

The river.