Perhaps I should be the poet laureate of my dog since Joey appears in two poems of mine that are recently published. The first, “Greyhound Joey vs. the Grackle” appears along with “North through Fog” in the February 2011 issue of the Houston Literary Review. The first of those is from my “Birds Nobody Loves” series which will someday be a chapbook and the other is from the “Highway Sky” series which is starting to sneak beyond chapbook length. Thanks to the editors of the Houston Literary Review for publishing those.

Joey’s literary adventures don’t end there, though. He also appears in a micro-haibun in the new pay attention: a river of stones anthology published by Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita who edited a massive amount of submissions from January’s river of stones challenge to produce a beautiful book that is worth every moment spent slowing down to savor it. There were a number of stones that I read in January as well as many that I missed along with some wonderful prose pieces. It was a treat to read again some of my favorites by Beth Adams, Angie Werren, Mark Stratton, and Kris Lindbeck. Along with some prose reflections on small stone writing by Beth Adams, Jean Morris, Laurie Kolp and Margo Roby. You can read the 2 stones I contributed at my mirco-poetry blog here and here (the second is another “Birds Nobody Loves” piece) or you can buy the book, which is really good.

And, now, Joey needs a walk. We’ll talk literature, and he’ll remind me that greyhounds are the only breed of dog mentioned in the Bible and then, who knows what inspiration the four-legged muse will next provide.

—

Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.

If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.

—

Chasing Westward

The vultures are heading west, their slow flying
shadow grace just an illusion of the blank sky.

Clock them. They’re racing away fast as thought.
Faster than often-repeated certainties and fears.

They escape with gizzards full, hurtling toward the sun,
shuttling some soul’s nourishing remains westward.

Out there, I hope, they’ll catch the day that never ends,
the place, I believe, night will never fall.

After sunset, I hear the rumbling highway, cars
chasing westward, chasing dreams, the fading light.

—

I wrote the poem the other day in response to some footage I shot a few months back. I was going to try letting the poem grow out of the video to see how that worked (there’s a great discussion on this over at the Moving Poems Forum), but as it turns out the footage I based the poem on is nowhere in this video.

Here’s how this video came about. Yesterday, I was sitting in traffic when my phone rang. After the call, I set the phone on the dash. While I was sitting there looking at it, I thought maybe I could turn the videocamera on and let it just film sky while I was driving. I did and whenever I came to a light, I’d just stop the recording and reset it in a different place, either on the dash or against the window. It never occurred to me until yesterday just how useful it is to have a perfectly flat camera.

By the time, I got home I had the footage and I thought this poem would work well with it.

The birds at the beginning are not vultures. They are grackles, and that was just a lucky shot. I’d love to have more than a few seconds of that, but they just happened to fly over at that moment. I didn’t even realize I had gotten them since I was watching the road. I left them in because I think it’s a cool shot and decided not to change the poem.

The grackles there work on another level for me too since this one feels like both a Highway Sky and a Birds Nobody Loves poem.

This videopoem is posted both at YouTube and Vimeo. Feel free to share it if you like it.

Train in Round Rock

We Talk of Trains

Road signs, riddled with bullet holes,
executed for the mathematical precision
with which they spell out isolation,
define and witness the desert loneliness.

We talk of oceans, beaches beyond horizons,
valleys hidden in the mountains, extinct volcanoes,
ruins and the railroad tracks following the highway.

A crumpled taco wrapper flutters up from the backseat.
Someone grabs it before it escapes out the window.
Dust devils swirl outside, wrestling earth and sky,
spinning proof that everything only wants to escape.

We talk our dreams in circles, always
winding up at the same rest stop, a teepee-shaped
gas station, the movie we’ll make when we get home.

A train rumbles alongside us; sharp-edged
graffiti decorates boxcars. We wonder about people
who painted their anger on a train in Saint Louis
only to watch it disappear into the desert.

—

“We Talk of Trains” and the accompanying photo “Train in Round Rock” were first published together in ouroboros review #3 (July 2009).

Winter Solstice

Grackles poke around the right-of-way,
a confusion of iridescent-robed seekers,
an endless search for grass seeds.

The junkie at the intersection watches,
never takes his eyes off the grackles
even when I hand him some crackers
and dried bits of bread. I look in his eyes,

nobody’s home, and we both understand
the birds’ bright yellow eyes are more alive,
more aware of the gray curtain coming
down fast from the north. He stretches his arms

ready to ride that icy tailwind south, but the
light changes to green—too many cars now
block his path, but it’s useless anyway.

All his flight feathers fell out six years ago.

He stands in exhaust fumes, praying that
grackles share seed when snow’s coming.

—

This poem is older than today. The solstice here in Austin came in hot and overcast so the eclipse was a non-event, but fortunately for the people on those street corners with the grackles, it’s not cold and certainly not likely to snow. At least not tonight.

I wrote this as part of my Birds Nobody Loves series, but I guess it can also fit with Highway Sky.

Update: I just discovered One Stop Poetry (tip of the cyber hat to Dick Jones for showing the way), another cool poetry sharing site and so I’ve linked this there. Go check out some of the other great work to be found in this week’s One Shot Wednesday.

1. About the Dead Man and Road Songs

The dead man has been everywhere, man.
He walks along the shoulder, holding out his thumb.
From the Yucatan to the Yukon, and the left shoulder to the right,
the dead man has seen it all.
On Saturdays, the dead man goes honky tonkin’.
They write songs about him and call him
‘Stranger’ in Texas and ‘Buddy’ in Tennessee.
He hopes to pull the tire jack from the stone and become the king of the road.
When Jesus left Chicago, the dead man followed hoping to elude
the hellhound on his trail.
The dead man still carries the old guitar he found at a crossroads in Mississippi.
He tries to play like Robert Johnson but comes off sounding like Elvis.
He’s met them both out on the highways and told them he was following the Dead.
That was a joke, though, and he thinks they knew it.
In Luckenbach, he joined other dead men and they sang songs by Willie,
Waylon & the boys until dawn when the Sheriff arrived.
The dead man let love slip away somewhere near Salinas
and hoped to reach Amarillo by morning.
He got off the L.A. freeway without getting killed or caught.
He is on the road again, chalking up many a mile.
He’s walked through every road song worth singing, a long strange trip indeed.
Yes, the dead man has been everywhere, man.

2. More About the Dead Man and Road Songs

The dead man prays for all the roadkilled animals at least once a day.
He started doing this a long time ago, and it’s become his habit.
The dead man bums a smoke when he can, another habit.
He has seen (and sometimes set with a careless flick of the butt)
summer wildfires that scorch the median.
Coming around again in springtime, he’s seen the wildflowers
growing best where the roadside had burned.
This makes him feel important.
In the summertime he sleeps among the roadside prairie grasses,
and he huddles under bridges in winter.
Someday, the dead man will get where he’s going.
He hopes he’ll know it when he gets there.
But the dead man has been on the highway for years.
You have seen the dead man, and you kept on driving.
He doesn’t mind, though, loneliness and solitude are his beans and beer.
The dead man understands this is how songs are made, where they come from.
These are the dead man’s wandering years, and he is in no hurry.

—

This is a response to the Big Tent Poetry prompt to write a dead man poem using the form invented by Marvin Bell, which is based on the Zen admonition to “live as if you were already dead.” I started writing sentences and soon I realized that the dead man was a highway wanderer and that there were lots of songs about him.

Many of the lines in Part 1 either refer to or are borrowed directly from songs by Geoff Mack, Hank Williams, Roger Miller, ZZ Top, Robert Johnson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, George Strait, Guy Clark, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Buffett, and the Grateful Dead.

Mad props to Dave Bonta for his post about formatting poetry in WordPress, which gave me the answer to indenting long lines, something I rarely use.

Go here to read more dead man poems.

My poem “Night at the Interstate Diner” is up over at qarrtsiluni. It’s part of the ongoing “The Crowd” issue, which also includes my photo-essay “The Minor Leagues.” Go check it out, and as usual, you can listen to me read it.

When the headlights
struck the stars

and the radio de-tuned
to static songs,

the highway dropped
away and clouds

grew shapes across
the galaxies below my tires.

And though my hands
still gripped the wheel,

I was now a passenger.

We read lines and studied rest stop signs to
learn the languages that govern highways.

Electric rivers flowed outward from cities
in red trails along the eastern highways.

We lived on the salty French fry grease and
fast food feasts of American highways.

We waited through summer road construction,
rebuilding and slowing northern highways.

In the mountains, we squinted through the dark
studying switchbacks to discern highways.

Green shadows crept across the road through
endless rolling tree-lined southern highways.

We avoided the rest stop stares of owls
and meth addicts on nocturnal highways.

In the desert night, lightning played with stars,
and we saw God on the western highways.

The engine downshifted, slow to grip the
road; tires clung like goats to mountain highways.

At night in desert motel rooms we laughed
and followed love down unspoken highways.

Yesterday what with celebrating Joey’s birthday and all, I forgot to link to a handful of stones. My poem “Highway 73 to Port Arthur” is up over there, though I submitted it untitled and that’s how it appears. It’s an attempt to describe the scene along highway 73 in southeast Texas after the devastation of Hurricane Ike, which came only 3 years after Hurricane Rita did a number on the region.

In other cool news, two of my poems are included in Austin-based Virgogray Press’s latest chapbook anthology: America Remembered. The poems, which first appeared here at Coyote Mercury, are “Trickle Down Hope” and “Deeper into Texas.” The former was a response to a Read Write Poem prompt. In fact, I think it’s the first prompt I did over at RWP. The latter was also a response to an RWP prompt, though parts of it where taken from a draft of an older poem. I originally called it “It’s Like a Whole Other Country.” You can order copies of America Remembered here.

This is my first attempt at a video poem. I haven’t made a video for fun in 16 years. Perhaps it was the time spent working on film sets in the early ’90s, but I lost interest somewhere along the way. The inspiration for this came from Christine Swint’s “Anybody’s Child” and  Dave Bonta’s post on poets and technology over at Very Like a Whale. In the comments I mentioned that I have a film degree and probably should take a crack at doing a video poem sometime.

Then, this evening, I was about to post this poem along with audio of me reading. The poem started with some pictures I had taken of my guitar with the iphone Hipstamatic ap, and I thought it would be cool to put one of the pictures up. Next thing I knew, I was building this video.

The “music” is something I recorded a few years back by overdubbing several tracks of me playing my guitar (well, really I was mostly playing the amplifier) and my wife’s bass. I’m not sure if it’s too loud, but I was trying to submerge the voice a little bit without losing too much clarity.

Here’s the text of the poem. The title is from a bumper sticker I saw twice last weekend while driving through the hill country outside Austin:

God Bless Johnny Cash

I drove to the river;
it followed me home.

Sweated the night surrounded
by lesser freshwater demons.

Sang pelagic chantys
heard second hand

from deep-gulleted
birds plucking a thunder bass.

The earth ate the moon,
broke the fall of morning.

Twisted roads passed tallgrass hills
that can’t remember trees.

In the morning, I prayed
the dusty pick-up truck petition,

God bless Johnny Cash.