Lost for Words
Slugs trace odd glyphs on the concrete walk.
Grandma had us sprinkle table salt on her porch
to discourage any messages from the other side.
Mornings now, when fog's suspension drags a sheet
across the world's view, I cipher curlicues
for word from you. But perhaps slugs, like angels,
have no word for grief, leaving us
to draft every horrible script.
These last hard years, frost's
innumerable marigold corpses, blackened rose petals
offered up by February's unexpected thaw, draw
the slugs out from their dens beneath the steps.
*****************************************************
Grandma's Dog Shorty and Me, That Second Morning
After an uncomfortable night spent in a borrowed suit one size
too small, I lean back in a chair on the porch to watch the ridge
across the hollow give birth to the sun. The brindle dog at my feet
has just come back from treeing a squirrel. Earlier, I could hear him
barking up that big hickory behind the chicken's coup, his voice
growing more plaintive as the minutes passed and I didn't
shoulder my Remington and go to him. Now, he's eyeballing me,
ears cocked in that questioning way dogs have when they
want you to come clean about why you've behaved differently
than your usual self, allowing breakfast to make an escape. I
could lean over and tell him about you and your absence here,
lying behind that window there where the folding chairs are stacked
in windrows, or that it's against the law to hunt on Sundays in Virginia,
but he lives in the now, as all dogs do, and has lost interest in me
and the squirrel to chase a flea across his belly with his teeth..
A wild turkey hen steps out the honeysuckle across the creek, a gaggle
of poulks flowing quicksilver around her heels, makes her way
past that yellow slow funeral sign to drink. The dog half-rises, gruh!
cut short by my hand's sudden clap on his skull's bony pate. "Not today,"
I growl at him, the hard knot in my throat doing its best to become a fist.
Behind the house, that squirrel's come back with a couple friends. Together,
they squack in chorus, as if heckling the absurdity of death and dogs. On the creek's
far bank, I watch those turkey chicks line up in the mud for that first drink,
their body's down the aged ivory of a church organ's keys, smile to myself
as they duck and bob in perfect disorder to the water's music. Closing my eyes,
I put myself in their place for the moment, and imagine that melody crisp, cold, sweet.
About the Poet: A native of Grundy, Va., Rufus A. Skeens lives and writes in Bristol, Va. His poem "Lost for Words" was the 2009 First Place winner of the Lou Crabtree Memorial Award for Poetry from the Appalachian Heritage Writer's Symposium. His "Grandma's Dog Shorty and Me, That Second Morning" won first place in the 2009 Wytheville Chautauqua Creative Writing Contest for Poetry.
