Anthony Watkins's Blog, page 3

Acorns Like Small Bombs

Thud against the shingles,

and sound like canon fire

on the metal front porch roof,

meanwhile the rain drizzles down,

its not even three am,

I should be sleeping,

but am not,

at least I am writing

and listening to the sounds

of nature against our little place,

grateful this last storm seems

to be looking for a vacant lot in Mexico

instead of our house.

I hope no one is harmed there,

I cannot volunteer our street

to save them.

Sandbox Afternoon

when I was little, my mother

I would sit in her bedroom in Chisholm,

me on the floor trying to color in the lines

in the coloring books she bought me,

her, in bed suffering from an illness

I did not understand, we looked together

into the rainy summer afternoon backyard

while the sandbox where we played with the matchbox toys

when my cousins from Africa visited, turned into a pond.

Today she is dead, and I am dying

and I haven’t been to Chisholm in sixty years.

It was just one summer,

and maybe just the one afternoon,

but I remember.

Three AM Coffee

Half a pot for a half of a cup,

Seems a waste to throw out a cup

and a half every morning, but its only fifty cents,

I suppose we can afford that.

I cant really drink coffee anymore, like so many things

I cant do, but I still love a taste of coffee,

a sip of strong blackness, swallowed hot, then later

in the day another sip or two, cold and black,

now with cornbread, reheated with generous butter,

the crumbs scraped into the dog’s bowl,

she is fond of cornbread, too.

We joke that cornbread is a butter delivery system,

which it is, in our house, four pats to a slice.

If This Is All There Is

I will take it, sleeping twenty hours each day,

digestive issues too embarrassing to talk about,

Anthony the ox, an ancient memory.

I will be a weak old man for as long as I have.

I have hopes of remission, of being nearly the ox

I once was, of doing, of being, of living the life,

but whatever comes, I’ll take it.

Like the shorn and blind Sampson,

I will turn at the grist and be happy to be here.

To know my friends, my loved ones,

the days or years, no matter the pains

and weaknesses are a blessing

and I am grateful for whatever remains.

Step Side SWB 1968

It was a super’s truck not a workman,

a white shirt-maybe-I’ll-go-let-Teague’s-load-a-forty-pound-box-of-nails,

a small role of tie wires and few odds bits and ends,

door handle sets, and door stops,

maybe some kitchen pulls and handles.

Two tone blue and white , factory AC

or a good hang on not too fancy,

still a work truck but not for hauling

timbers and wall board, maybe

a few bags of plaster, buckets of joint mud.

Today they are classics, cute,

today the new equivalent costs 

seventy grand, has four doors,

pre heated seats and steering wheel

and defrosters in the rear view mirrors.

I don’t think I would want to be a super

in todays world, but in 1968, my uncle’s

GMC seemed like a good way to go.

The Taste of a Dairy Barn

Since we have been fighting

my stage four liver and pancreatic cancer,

and I say we, because I am not in it alone,

but since we started the chemo,

every time I wake up I have a taste

in my mouth, not pleasant not awful, either.

It always takes me back to being about

five or six, following my brother

from the feed room in the milking barn

where grandpa kept the pelletized food

that Hazel, the nice longsuffering black women

who milked the cows would shake a bucket out

 in front of each cow when she locked their heads

in the  wooden escutcheons.

After she hooked up the milkers,

she would wash the concrete floor

with a high pressure hose  towards the drains,

before and after the first and last cow,

she poured bleach on every thing

and hosed it all out.

You might not care about this

I do, because we would as small boys

run barefoot through the pelletized food in the toughs,

avoiding the big wooly heads of the cows.

Hazel would tell us to be careful to not frighten

the cows and put them off their milk.

I was always more worried about them

taking a bite out of me, but of course

 that never happened.

What did happen was I have forever

etched into my memory the smell

of cattle urine, bleach, fresh milk

and the pellitzed food, and that is

the smell or taste I have when I wake

Three poems from this morning:

Looking Out Upon the Pond

From a shaded park bench amongst
the trees a most naturistic place,
carefully planned and planted by man
with their best effort to look unplanned.

The pond, built with bulldozers
and graders and a backhoe or two,
stocked with sundry fish from sundry places.

Even though I know it is an artificial
piece of nature, it works as the random,
unplanned ducks glide about making me
remember ducks, in a park faraway in time
and distance, where I fed my fritos to them
and they seemed to like it.

Blue Moon Before Sunrise

Light around the black out curtain
and the antback travels across
the tree and then the stem of the leaf
and from the broad oak leaf forms
a floating brigade of black and red

Oh well, Okeechobee,
a lake turned to sea,
no tea cake today,
just deep black muck
sweet, sweet cane,
fires and smoke.

Twelve Words

bacon, boloney, tacos
beer, coffee, gumbo
cornbread dressing
korma, and softshell crabs.

I Had an Old Fashioned

a twice removed derivative New York School poem:

I
I had
I had an old
I had an old fashioned
I had an old fashioned with an Indian River Orange Peel
I had an old fashioned with Glades Sugar
I had an old fashioned with branch water from Ichetucknee
I had an old fashioned with a cherry from California
I had an old fashioned with Tennessee whiskey
I am old fashioned with a drink in my hand
I am old fashioned.

The Girl Said

I know it’s a poem about dreaming,

but it makes me think of being awake,

 and not being able to sleep,

you know its so hard to sleep at twenty.

I thought about saying wait until you are sixty-five,

but I was listening to her on a webcast,

so she couldn’t hear me, and then

I thought about dreaming and being awake

and wondering which was which,

though I was driving, so I hope I wasn’t sleeping,

and I passed a sign that asked “got junk?”

and I thought I probably do

and I was pretty sure I wasn’t dreaming.

When the professor remarked

that it was a company poem,

though I don’t think it was the same poem,

they had moved on

and I was thinking about the got junk sign.

A company poem,

and triangulation and how the poet,

the reader, and the poem

create a company

and I am thinking about a corporate poem

and wondering how that would work

and who would write it?

Marketing, I am pretty sure.

Bury Me on Highway 231, Again

This road is sacred ground
from Panama City to Pell City
and even to Oneonta,
every mile, every inch,
I have traveled so many times.

I have seen the railroad underpass
on 90 flooded like the cement pond that it is,
I have shopped at Sikes and Kohns
and found them too expensive.

I have eaten at every truck stop
and barbeque joint between
Montgomery and Dothan.

This is the homeland road
this is the path of my life.

I spent 35 years far away,
but coming back to Compass Lake,
to Cottonwood and Campbellton
I felt like a train once again
placed on my own railroad track.

I no longer know anyone along this path,
my first girlfriend is buried there,
others, too, by now, but when
I turn the wheel and point it north
or south this bit of asphalt
floods my soul.