Rural Poem

There was once a poem
About the child’s crisp rural morning
The scissortail in the pecan tree
The smell and sound
Of prairie orchards

Dark sinister
Amber flies the wasp stone menace line
Abstract curving lucida unique
Among the branches swaying
Swavy oncoluse the burr whith hymnude ummthup
Tipang its careless bored pocket rocket water tank
To ragweed

There was once a poem
Digging potatoes in Oklahoma
Carrying spuds into the soft dark barn
Cool owl tractor raftering the ooly hoo
Sawblades mason jar
Its iron seat of polka-dotty holes

Potato pile
When leathern living flesh is made
In the hot clods of the ground
When sorghum abounds
When catfish sounds resound
The deep sad sucking echoes
In a well when fin cuts flesh
When hook sleeps deep for red gill

There was once a poem
In overalls
Striped baggy with
Brass catches
Shiny and cold
The naked chest is bold
And crushed granite litters the ground
Even Will Rogers chased
Rabbits through the tumbleweeds

There was once a poem
Feeding chickens in their hut
Their stanky flaky scut
Like a murk of fluff
And their slave male underlings
Pecked down to reddened skin
Where the quills begin
There’s a Benjamin Franklin
Made of chicken skin
Flying a kite of feathers.

In the cellar
There are some cots
And big jars full of drinking water
And the spiders hide in crooked crates
There’s a man a woman a daughter