Clyde Kessler

 

Clyde Kessler lives with his wife Kendall and son Alan in  Radford, Virginia.   He has published a few poems on line in Cortland Review,  Prairie Poetry, and Nantahala.  He says in a email that “My earliest memory is of an event with a mule and with kinfolk when I was less than two years old...watching a mule going round and round a big container of sorghum stalks and squeezing the stalks so the juice went into some sort  of vat.  I had to walk up close to the mule and somebody got me out of the way.”

 

 

 

DODDER-VINE

 

The dodder-vine is choking some other weeds

where we cross Hackle Creek, where we hear

a crazy bumblebee or two in the touch-me-nots,

where a few quartzite stones glisten with mica

and water beside the tracks of a doe and fawn

through a splotchy green edge of wilderness

never our home.   You'd steal all day for a place

to own, I'd law nearest to nothing and fade away

the same as a poem kicked homeless to the stars

since nobody reads it, the tracks are sloshed away.

 

 

 

LEAVING CROW ISLAND

 

I left Crow Island midwinter years ago.

The lake was freezing.  The sun was slanted

into the boat.  The place was still Tesgara then,

"the crow's boulder" where a crow never lived.

Maybe an old woman thought the tallest rock

fit heaven like a crow's black wing.  Maybe

she carried a dead infant there to hear God

answer the why.  Or there was a storm ship

flogged into the shore on a spring night

with the madness of the survivors whispering

to imaginary birds.  I was born there

in the one house, a shack called Meager Field.

The summer moonlight hunched into the door.

The autumn gulls hurried south like old men.

My parents learned to leave their work alone.

Crops failed.  Water tainted their words

with a drought.  We left then with my sober aunt,

and behind us,  it was all Crow Island in the snow,

the island flew wildly towards the sun.

 

 

 

TRICKSTERS

 

People who carry these lights all winter

make no friends in our town.

They stand a pale blue on a cliff and look

married with the clouds, meteors and sharp falls.

Their shore mobilizes the scrape of Saturn

against the sun, or some other stray life

that comes howling real soon from the air.

 

 

I'm closer to all their hoaxes: whatever I can sell

in a trinket shop, or trowel up for evidence

is easy to set loose across your shadow.

You and I are born with such moth-like clay

shimmered into love, there'll be no other life.

 

 

So we watch a moonrise skinnt from the town,

it might fit my first family to the news you want.

I am settled where a mottled house begins to slide

into a trade with you.  And I'm leaving you again

where these strange lights prime away like darkness,

or spread out like an island that floats against the stars.

 

 

 

CORDIALS

 

Sometimes I dream a wild mint cordial waking me.

It has some whiskey, bergamot, and molasses, it has

the start of spring, and a rough draw into the world,

a pale old recipe toured across a fine silence for a voice,

something marvelous turned like a stray morning's look

where it might have its life again.  My grandmother

made them long ago, another simple work she knew.

She sang to the robins, and the crows.  She steeped

the mint leaves and told me about bootleggers hiding.

She gathered some periwinkle flowers along a fence.

We drank some cordials then and praised warm days.

I think I almost woke into that house today reborn.

 

 

 

 

GREASY GRASS

 

It grows with its greasy stem timed against October,

and easing away a grandmother's field before the pines.

Some checkered-skippers traipse among the last flowers

hunting for cheese-mallow.  Noon is freezing and colder

than the sunrise.  Everything in the field is bending

with the northwest wind, even the best fool greasy grass, 

and the dirt poor broom sage uphill from our barn.

 

 

It holds its place like a sliver of coal soot before a frost.

Its seeds-or is it the old flowers?-are purplish, gimpy

tops shammed for a sparrow.  Pluck a few, and the draw

of the thin grease raids every life line in your hands.

You might have been courting a ghost, or stacking fodder.

You might be drunk and stomping with a fiddler's wail.

The time has rushed away, and the fields are too rich for us,

we'll sell what we have now with weeds.