Because all at once
happens life, loose shakes
it to calm coherence
the wires that my brain connect.
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
Monthly Archives: May 2016
Dragon Love
When fiery dragons fuck,
do they always get burned,
or does their ecstasy
take wing, fly off the scales,
so that the only heat
they feel comes from passion,
their flaming hearts steeling
mere skin against hot harm,
infernal emotions
dousing conflagration?
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
Commerce
Hearting profoundly
the physical expression
of your soul’s beauty,
I can’t resist invading
its apertures so that we
commingle spirits
in fusion of flesh.
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
Southern Smells
Scents before a rain:
Honeysuckle, turpentine,
Magnolia flowers.
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
Mixing Metaphors
Birdsong at four, after restless sleep,
the world seeping back into my consciousness,
I think first with typical human egotism,
but it’s the other way around, isn’t it,
the world drawing me back into itself,
one more pinch of flour beaten into the batter,
another drop of tint diffused into the base paint
until it’s indistinguishable if not unseen,
though even in dissolution my bones will feel the shaking,
even if my still-groggy brain can’t grasp
what the birds are stirring up.
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
A Song for My Grandfather
A cappella in the Nonconformist sense
as well as unaccompanied,
the mostly elderly congregants
make the Sacred Harp sing
(so few of them now, but
you can find them, like everything,
on the Internet),
its notes shaping their harmony,
their concentrated voices
resonating in some old pine-wood church,
a few keeping time
with a raised and lowered arm,
believing the words,
but breathing the music,
and I think of my grandfather,
not an educated man,
but one who loved to go to “singings,”
who had gone to the singing schools
that rural churches used to sponsor,
knew how to sing his part,
a way to take his rest from life’s work,
of farming, driving trucks, and building caskets,
and when I hold his hymnal from the 1940s,
its blue cloth cover faded but intact,
like my memories of him,
I imagine it in his stronger hands,
him all dressed up in “spoaty”*
clothes and singing loud.
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
*His pronunciation of “sporty.”
Note: The poem is mostly true, but I have invented a few details where memory has failed or in the case of events before my time.
Drifters
Cottonwood floaters
like snowflakes in greening spring,
free-falling, weightless.
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
Jay
Perched in the tree,
he’s a subtle marvel
in his morning coat
of blue and grey,
camouflaged among the leaves
by his likeness to the patches
of sky visible between them;
but reticent only
in resting appearance,
he squawks his displeasure
at the idling cat
he dives to peck:
touché!
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
