Strand

Strand

Strand

Alphabet, sluice the porch.
 
 
Bind (and try to braid) our river-wrack and leavings.
 
 
Used to, it was cackle-berries and cat-heads with him when 
he dry-docked home.
 
 
Daddy: Mama, don’t cook all the running out them yellows! 
Me: And raise them biscuits big, for sopping!
 
 
Other egg-names of ours I’ve kept are hen-drops, and coop-mines 
(and -moons), and chicken-lights, and dumpties.
 
Here is the fillingstation-shirt he got from when he 
pump-monkeyed for money. The name-eggs (red-stitched 
and patched to where his chest would go) say Eugene on one 
side and Esso on the other. Happy Motoring! is tiger-tailed in 
script across its back.
 
 
Gas-smell’s the main meat. Grass-sweat. Gnat lotion, 
neckwise. Ghost-whiffs of GOOP for gunky hands.
 
 
His hands (and mine, hammering) made this hutch. I reckon 
your rabbit could use her a cabin or someplace. Chicken-wire’s right 
airy, and cleans. Let’s drive some stilt-legs down to set her up, so 
dogs don’t help theirself to supper.
 
 
(Instinct—they can\'t hardly help it—makes them try.)
 
 
Jim Beam & Jim Crow drive him through, like Jesus does 
some others.
 
 
Sure I\'m evergreen for Wallace but I\'m not no KKK.
 
 
Leaf. Leave. Leaves. Leaving. Left.
 
 
Have I said yet how mudworms (and flickery mind-minnows) 
live off leaf-chaff and blown bark-slough and home-grounds 
and gravel? Son, rearing you some is easy: they durn nearabout feed 
theirselves!
 
 
Time was—or truer, nights were—he’d porch-beach finally, 
or suddenly yard-founder, from nowhere.
 
 
One time I kerosened an ancient oak to lure him home.
 
 
Polaroid
       The charcoal-stump of it.
       The hole.
 
       The rain-pond, ringed with turpentiney-smelling pines 
       (and understory-birds) and stinging vines.
 
 
My quail-call was too sissy-high by half but strong as his.
 
 
But his (El Camino, Evinrude) rooster-tail was taller.
 
 
—Across to the Sand-Bar, right regular. L.J.’s, up by, Eight-Mile. 
The Dock (On Tuesdays, 2 for 1). Smokey’s Darts & Gristle.
 
 
There was the trestle that carried the train that trusted the 
trestle that bridged the river that cooled the fish that fed the 
boy that watched the trestle that slow-cankered and -rusted 
and fell.
 
 
Wadn’t that your deddy we seen—hunching like a stray, Sunday 
last—underneath the Upriver Overpass?
 
 
‘Daddy’ Eugene Hutto = verb.
 
 
(Plus, how to hammer, wire, and jerry homely words.)
 
 
Ex-anchored, for example.
 
 
Yesterdaddy.
 
 
Zags.