The Old Mule

Bent Creek Pond, 1987

This is the best year, we drive
past the gravel in to grass
near a water edge with button-
brush and grasses giving way
to an evening’s worth of sitting
back checking out, but really
worrying about your thin
summer dress and maybe you
thought of me. But either way
your chest filled in good air
and you shake hair from your
face to look out beside me
and it is summer, July almost, so
tonight may be just hours, but
those hours rise to a chorus
of something much longer, held
up taller than the fall of a night
lit by bright stars, arranged by
coon dogs in pens and water
frogs, maybe oaks, and the pond
breaks in small turmoil on a moss
rich bank, eased with the low hum
of two people sitting close, watching.

Beautiful day, first of may. Setting out plants in the garden and everything is fine.

--

Poem by John Hodgen, a great poet.

Clay County

Just past Kellie Mae's Klip 'n' Dip Beauty Salon
and the cement slab, cinder blocks, and rusty tin roof
of the Lawtey Grace Community Evangelical Church,
and behind the saw grass and scrub brush along Pitchkettle Road,
a young black girl stands dawdling with one foot behind the other,
her toe digging rhythmically into the red clay of her driveway,
her heel wagging cozily like a cat's tail, a metronome,
as she talks to a young man on a motorcycle,
his red helmet still on, true biker of love.

And just before the buckwheat field that opens lonely as grace,
the field with the massive trees in the middle, shattered by
lightning,
a slender roan horse feeds under its basilica of broken branches,
because he knows that is the place
where the soft tufts of grass
taste the sweetest.

"Clay County" by John Hodgen, from Grace. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.