Ice Lament

My first day at Queen City Ice
was my last, leather-gloved
in the freezer hefting ice blocks
for the wiry, cold-eyed foreman whose
white office wall held the state portrait
of George Wallace, smiling,
flanked by the American flag.
He chased me from the blue
saying, gid out, as though his ice,
frozen right out of the tap,
right out of the amber water
of Lake Tuscaloosa, was too pure
for all of God's children. In
the crystalline air, his nose keen
as a hound dog's, he claimed to scent
sour beer from the night before, so gid out.

We weren't about to get along.
His family was ice, and I
only wanted summer work
out of the humid, hellish season,
to walk to my job under the dark limbs
of live oak, to labor cold and dry, to feed
the chute silvery blocks to grind
coarse or fine, to dump for a fisherman,
his pickup backed up to the dock,
a half-barrel of cubes into the cooler
of catfish stink-bait, warm, rotted cheese,
a half barrel of crushed
into his cooler of sandwiches
and beer, and to walk home,
still chill, across the tracks
as the late afternoon thunderstorms
broke up and the asphalt street steamed.


Moon at Shuffleboard

The moon, so often busy plying
the night sky, steps into the corner pub.
We end up playing shuffleboard on the long,
blond grain of a table milled from pine.

Everyone else sips warm beer
in the smoky air. Young, I practiced
the life of a Chinese poet, entirely
in translation, and lay a little drunk

in the tall grass of an abandoned olive grove
to watch the hill crest glow and grow sharper
with back light, sharper, then the crickets hushed
and she rose, just a wisp of cloud beneath

like sea foam. To see her step into
the olive branches strained my throat, her farther
away glancing through the limbs. I slept,
woke cold. Soon as I stumbled from the orchard

the moon and I grew more comfortable
with each other. She watches for me,
I think. At shuffleboard, her luminous touch
is soft. My game is no challenge for her.

I squint, aim, give a gentle push, and my puck
flies from the table to gutter. She smiles,
takes her turn in a whisper. You'd never guess
she pulls tides in the back of her mind.


Bluegill Dawn

In the morning oak, redwings trill
and chatter. Bluegill and bass pluck

struggling insects off the face of the lake,
leave silent, widening circles.

The big fish rests his belly on mud
in the shallow water. Hathaway aches

to slip a barbed hook through the muscle
of its lower jaw. Ball cap low, tongue

pink between his lips, he's all in one
concentration, fly-casting with a popper,

a cast each step. Across the water
he glides around a bend as I pause

to take bluegill from the weeds
along the bank and see dawn

in the subtle scales down their sides:
dark blue for the early sky,

green for the line of hills, rose
for the clouds, white, first light.


Evidence at the Moon Winx Motel

The Moon Winx winked at me once.
My friend Hershey and I were staying
a couple nights to visit and see
how the years had moved on without us.
To get lost then leave for good,
shake the dust from our boots, spit
in the Black Warrior River and go.

The garish, neon sliver of a moon,
floating outside our window beside the ragged
highway, didn't help. What did we want
but to live our lives forgiven and free
of earlier blunders and the moon
against the night sizzled from wide eye
to wink, wide eye to wink, wide eye to wink.

The bathroom wall is what I can't forget.
The second night I woke, heard the train
in the darkness, miles off in the sparse,
pine woods, heard the slow coal barges
on the river, got up to piss and stared
at the wall past the mirror to see
a batch of botched plaster, the spread
of a shotgun blast. Under the wink
of a moon who always knew what you
were up to, someone had had enough,

held the barrel to his temple
and pushed the trigger with a thumb.
I ran my fingers along someone's
sloppy mending, lumpy like salmon roe,
where the gore must've hung, buckshot
buried beneath, like touching a fossil,
not the life but time and the hollow left behind.