Sample Poems by Art Homer
First Cast
Trout and pennyroyal mint strike
the eye with that electric
glint of a battery on the tongue—
metallic, like biting foil or the first
squint of morning through the sparkle
of acacia leaves into sun and lake.
It’s no mistake I find myself here
among these silver things, knowing we
wilt quickly in the heat and rely on special
circumstance and sparse rain, take water
near its source and offend as often as please.
At the stream edge, willows shade a bed
of watercress. I cut green twigs to boil
later with the mint. My sore throat and headache
hint at thin skin. A rainbow’s belly
flashes and disappears. This whitest flesh
stays firm until cooked, melts into oily
mucilage too strong to eat. This morning
is cool and dry. Sun levers under trees
to boil the dew away. The bruised mint
cools my palms and quickens my first cast.
Hatchery Trout on the High Plains
If wind would stop
hill’s breath, grass could tell
these fish their effort
only pumps them through bland stages.
Even here there is room
for the wily one back of the spill.
The big rainbow checks, gills red
slices in the swerve toward food,
as if in afterthought the swarm
of like bodies were enough.
I stand here, a father, over hills
fathomless as water, wondering what
answer a daughter needs to still her
hunger in a distant city of fish and flowers.
If I sing down the river road,
if I travel to the sea in my heart
like a mother, on what anvil will wind
beat me thin enough to glaze
the miles I fish for its ventriloquist
words: Fish Creek, Verdigris. But she
will not hear me and I am still here.
Even the hand must race the arm
to the end of its swing. Like a man
casting coin after coin in a fountain,
I throw my line across unlikely water,
hang my delicate flies in brush.
Trees grab a loose hold on sand
and cactus floors sparse forest.
Dark flycatchers dart from pines,
sure over silver riffles, knowing
their prey and catching it
time after time.
Summer 1992, Sarpy County
No one comes home in this heat. The roads
fill with honest dust we shake from our
feet like pilgrims. Only guests, tenants
of shade and breeze work hard at belief.
Boats lever form and oar in light’s face,
the broken line where what cloud there is
slips into solid blade and handle.
Water, sky’s torn skin, leaks images
and steals heat. This is the flaw we love
in strangers, forgive so often we
lose parents, children, whole families
town doctors pronounced O.K. Father’s
heart was not sound as they’d said, fainting
spells fatal. Paint and the remaining few
bathers peel at the main attraction:
phony beach and lighthouse built before
the war. Miles of land bound corn ignore
the lack of wave, the forlorn beacon
warning only tractors of the blue
land ahead. When relations gather...
(to eat and honor the dead? ... “it would please
your mother...”) under the locust tree,
wish for flood. No locust swarms will glove
this land, drive farmers out. It’s been ages
since such luck, the local stock grown dull
on milo and church. Three heifers tease
their bulk through a stock pond’s dark surface.
Hogs never chew the cud of their grief,
but swallow earth whole, on the one chance
they’ll be spared to breed another dour
profit for the dead man’s son to hoard.
Cottonwood Blue
If I could forget the plains behind this stand,
forget the train car and how I first saw
brown clouds tabled against a ceiling of heat,
I could imagine this river valley
gave relief to the land, that these tallest trees
diced sky into music above the oxbow
lake where bodies sink surely as pilings
set each spring for temporary docks,
where foundations lower houses like bait
for the leviathan rising of frost.
But it is summer. Useless cottonwoods
do not crack in cold. They’ve thrown a storm
of pith and down across lawn and screens.
Through field glasses each tree becomes the small
woodland of childhood. This too is dust.
What we imagined when we came here becomes
detritus of wind, the linty pickings of pockets.
Only the eye rejoices at them. Sight is no carpenter,
knows of nothing to do with wood and space
but to call the body out into the evening.
Night is the water we swim, unsafe by nature
of its color and the long light of farms
carrying trains of grain and chemicals east
into the mirror of sunset, dull, unsilvered by heat.
What I have come to remember is not here.
The flat statement of grain elevators rises
across a mile of prairie grass. The mind
circles in flammable dust, considers
an old tautology of feast and vermin, crops
and livestock repeating the expected line.
In last light, the scheduled thunderstorm
comes driving town to dinner, builds
a mountain range to dwarf the land. One butte
collapses into ridge after ridge of night,
a fierce knowledge playing its slopes
long after the dark has fallen
and houselights sink into the earth.
County Road 142
—Appanoose
Sun, having drunk the last of sky’s cidery color,
warms a woman standing inexplicably in a soy
field seventeen miles outside Mystic, Iowa.
I finish my roast beef in Brazil and leave a tip.
The fox in a stand of red oak and basswood
has his smells all mixed up by the harvest dust
and wanders into a pack of coyotes by the creek.
Peace and stubble sharpen silence for the farmer
after he’s shut the combine off and climbed down
to find those two paws peeking from bean head
blades as if a dog were inside trying to get out.
It doesn’t take much more than I know to tell
there’s no room for animals as big as gray dogs
in the jammed machinery. Skin, but not much
else is wreathing the cams and gears. I’m losing
my lunch at the turnoff—not because the three
coyotes leapt into the blades. I’m glad the fox
got off. It was just bad beef. The road takes no
good servants but the alert , takes no excuse.
The farmer lays a tongue in the grass, but I upend
the coals of patience and wash out my mouth.
The Amish girl waves roadside thanks a hundred yards
from the pheasant I avoid. Her mother has sewn
bright panels into her dress to make her more visible.
Her white bonnet carries the sweet smoke of her hair
into the wind without spilling any. None of the horses
I see are working the fields though the black buggies
swarm back and forth on fall business. A few pines
on a rise, the last light on the low bluff relieve prairie.
Soon the curl of wind-eddies, snow filled, will reach
into the shallow valleys, rake the cottonwoods—
will claw across ridgepoles of barns, trying hay doors,
the Anabaptist bevels of local faith and joinery.