Three Houston Poems from the Eighties

Christmas, Fort Worth, ‘68 The trees acknowledged me, appreciating my attention. As I pressed my back against its bark, an elm tree yielded a soft embrace and wrapped its trunk around my trunk. The sandstone flagstones in a deserted gazebo displayed themselves, as they performed translucent patterns. Walking home, where nobody walks, I noticed people staring from cars, as I picked up scattered cotton boles near the cattle barns where the Stock Show would open. Cotton, boy, I said to myself, what do you know about cotton? I asked and then my father drove up in a brand new Oldsmobile and asked me to listen to his stereo. SHUNYATA SONATA for the “Dharma Bums” who picked beans in Oregon for 50 cents an hour while the overseers bootlegged wine to the derelicts who slept in bunks in Portland for $2.00 a night, while a squidgy-faced old woman sat on the steps of a slumlord and laughed. a sonic boom shattered their high as they stumbled out into the streets, stoned and dazed – “Nixon was coming...”. their heads were shaved and like antennae picking up every vibration became aware of F.B.I. listening devices sprouting in the park like the beans they ate for salad late at night, attuned to the symphony of sirens rising near and far, in city streets, inside their heads. All Aboard for Alligators Near the mouth of the Brazos (the arms of the gods) a reptilian ancestor stretches webbed limbs on a sun-drenched sandbar, his bellowing grunt betraying a hunger as deep as his lineage. On the steep banks of the slow, brown river an armadillo roots in the brush, his pink snout raw with the red dirt’s abrasive grit. Deer grazing in the nearby clearing enjoy protective custody. Humans tread narrow paths; but do not disturb pristine areas deceptive in simplicity. I think I hear the grass growing; permit me this moment in high moving shade.