Gareth Lee

Nashville

This scum and stars, fixed

largesse—distant

those blue fields, that

Lexington where-

as here the cows taught

me their geography and

lay their ribs.  (In that

order, verse, chorus, verse.)

And here I trawl and learn

the myth of ones who

rattle their rings on

beer cans, who share cigarettes

just north of trespass.  (Who

could reproduce their

twang on the walls

with a felt pen, some skin….)

And some say ad nauseum,

ex deus, etc, as it was

in the sternum so

it shall be, this cosmopolis.

Now, 

calling the hound Khartoum. 

Seducing the sainted

boot, sequin something.

While all about a

musk, ghost

of a bone seen, the slid

river mud far off.

Overwhelm

And Tupperware seal broken for a week

and biscuits softened: Midwestern air

about, we had sustenance.

And such blue pulp in the water,

where there was water, was reflective

of the sky. 

Redfern, ‘97, small town, I remember

I blinked.

Coalfey slept, brought to sleep and those

hypnotic road markers,

the grooves at the highway’s side, then

slowness.  Deep

fog and we parked glaze-eyed and

at Goldfarb’s Mart we got our popsicle fix.     

What mealy rawness in our mouths, thirst

we had.  Waking under a ruling blue,   

the single horizon around

us, our worlds halved.     

Gareth Lee took his MFA at Brown.  His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Canary, Denver Quarterly, First Intensity, GutCult, Northwest Review, POOL, Spinning Jenny, and elsewhere.  He lives in New Jersey.