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g r a v e l
A L I T E R A R Y J O U R N A L
Leonore Wilson
Image Credit: Michael Cory
Persephone's Return
She had never been timorous
so when the dark satanic milk
was offered her she chugged it
down among the corn lilies
and wild onions, this girl
who played with dragon geese
and garter snakes and the god
fed her in the house of his father
the ferment of dervishes
so she could become one
singing of the philosophy
of surrender, its radiance,
the hieroglyphics of rivers,
of ten thousand paths
that dig through sandstone and
thus she became a scholar
of gargoyles, of fleas and greed,
of everything marred, harmed,
a shepherd to envy, to the ignorant,
to the gods of oil and war, those
with golden purse strings
who exploit the backs of slaves,
for she was taught well
by the master who had drugged her,
suckling that sweet milk
of rage and revenge, so when
she returned to her mother
with her whip-marks
and scars, she needed
more than just an apple
and a cigarette, she glared at her maker,
scratched at her, hot-tempered
wench, balking
for she was the daughter
of everything knowable,
her world held the veracity
of ours: mangled carcass,
retractable claw.
Tyger
As a child, he chose the most inviolable—
fiery-orange with black stripes;
his small feet
could not nail the stirrups
so I pressed his hands to the pole—
young voyager
and mother, we spun as the monstrance
harp crowed like a Gallic cock,
as the body pulled around the soul—
wretched animal strapped
at the neck, while nearby
the fallow water and the toy train shook.
O radiant we were, gazing out
at each other as God must have
gazed over chaos, the bruise of enough
dividing the dry from the
wet, as the spirit
of creation separated from
the black of eternity, this
our animist kingdom, our garden, deceptive,
though full of promise. Here we were
dressed in sunlight, barren
in thought,
when in the distance
the cathedrals
sounded their iron bells
reminding us with every ballast-bong
we mortals were paradox:
curved doves, dying heroes,
vile, sinful and certain
of punishment.
Time Capsule
When they open it
years from now,
when the olden days
come pouring out
will there still be
ordinary things
like wind up clocks
and packets of cigarettes,
candies, chips, and
snacks; will there be
commodities and
guarantees, banknotes
and headscarves,
tractors and combines,
bovines lowing in meadows,
children’s toys whittled
from bark, ferry rides
and merry go rounds;
will there be those
sleeping under blankets
on the sidewalk and
migrants working in the fields;
will there be quicklime and dry rot,
small country churches
and mustachioed policeman;
will there be death
with all its awareness
and birth that comes
like a bright light,
will your memory
and my memory
be contained
in our progeny
or will the days
be indifferent like
something cracked
without movement,
in other words
will the flame of life
still hold as it does
today, burning brightly
like the touch of kerosene
on paper.
Practical World
He said he wanted to know
what they knew—those who did
practical things like building boats
or cleaning streets, so my son
shaped by the sharp angles
of academia decided to live
on water where the red-winged
blackbirds clung to the swaying
tulles, where the cool winds of March
clipped the deluge of the cattail
thickets, and where the first settlers
of the Delta needed words to describe
their often dire predicament:
Disappointment Slough, Hope Trace, Poverty Road.
Here life had been unpredictable, undependable
and some had drowned in the sloughs,
the desiccated bottomlands, channels, canals,...
But not my son who rose each morning
to travel to the inner city with a team
of riparian men to jackhammer
the hard macadam of Oakland, to hear
the dunch of his own blood
drum in his ear, noggle his heart
until the ground opened up
like eternity, he was that driven
my physicist, to know the gowpen of matter,
know his fellow creatures—men
who ate from tin cans and drank eagerly
from heavy thermoses as if knocking back
the sea. This was not
a straightjacket for him, this everyday
grit-grail, no it deepened his thinking,
made him love the earth more
learning the hot ooze of the hour,
this workbench mentality, grunt and pluck
of male heritage.
Book in the Garden
Here I knew he was up to something,
practicing Portuguese amongst
the narrow rows of brotherly beanstalks and blue-shadowed squash,
feuding basil and recumbent tomatoes;
flipped dictionary offering the dew-stir of words—
restless, courageous,
my courting mid-twenties son fecund with language,
and me quizzing him through declensions/ conjugations
in the deep rush of dusk, in the honey-drip
dawn; ah how I knew my boy’s bramble fire
meant he was not willing to water, rake, shovel or weed,
but to distinguish
the riddled lights of Rio where he first rustled his lover....
Oh fat splash of summertime sounds
that shuffled him into a new culture--
renegade pup escaping indolent buttoned-down California
to fiery Brazil, drumming its amorous
etymology, his future once fluxing finally found.
Ode to Mustangs (after a photograph by Hardy Wilson)
Tumbling
dust as one solitary
male
scrabbles over the monolithic
Nevada desert.
then another, with hooves kicking hard,
sharp half moons
while phantom mice scatter into
their canopied chamber...
These are savages, inhospitable
as the earth
that skrawks and crackles
beneath them,
at the stub-end of summer.
Violence incarnate
of the irreverent old west--
listen to the meteorites hiss,
like skatepunks on half-pipes,
bronze gods in their male
fiefdom
teeth scoured with salt
manes whipped by wind--
all tantrum
a spew of emotions
repeating this annual
range ritual
as the sweet mares
graze elsewhere
beneath the ribs of sheer
mountains,
oblivious to the awful neighing
in the chill domain
of the good gods’ dawn.
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