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Graffiti
You go here looking for something else.
Hunters have clumb the old road,
tires scrabbling the ruts
or rubbering the larger rocks,
the tale of their treads
stippled with vee cuts
by deer hooves ferrying up and back
in the days hence.
Save the grade
there are miles of nothing
but rock and brush
and the splash of aspen we chase
like some slogged bucket
of green gone yellow paint.
We search the glades for trees
your father marked fifty years before
and not find them this time, but
find faces slurred across the once smooth bark
and musings of other Basque shepherds
dimmed with scarring, and one
carving somehow protected from sun and wind,
a crude man in shoes and shorts,
with a stern lip, raised fists and an epitaph,
Joe Louis 1941.
The Abacus of Motors
He lived until the next time,
the first sip replete
with fresh froth on his upper lip,
until the next and the next
pushed each back
a little further in his mind,
until deadened,
his mind fell behind him
like car smoke
wriggling toward the curb.
The hours toward five
made him nervous:
power for the TV and the radio,
the refrigerator and the bathroom light.
He counted backward
by smudged steps
what he hoarded most,
motors of the night.
How far the power company let him slip
past five and Friday at five went
unheeded as an abacus
of clock hands, calendar, extra sleep.
The Walk
We stop
on our walk. We whisper.
Windows are up.
It’s getting late.
There’s a new foundation
where the rectory once stood.
It’s dark and warm
and summer slides by like river.
You’re looking at a memory
of an old building.
Your father has just dropped you off.
He tells you not to worry
about being late,
but through the windows
you see them standing,
hear them chanting
pledge of allegiance,
and beside them., like shadows,
like ravens, nuns in dark habits.
Twice you are stopped,
by a neighbor and the barber.
You never tell me what happened
when you got home.
Thomas Robert Barnes has been published widely in the small press.
He is currently doing readings and a seminar "Ritual of Success"
in California and abroad. He is an avid telemark skier, rower and a flyfisher.
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