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When I lived in smoke heat on the Clearwater of
Idaho I knew that the river would exhale
into my late-evening rooms if I opened them
but now I am in the dog days on the Red of
North Dakota and the water will be hot as
afternoon all night
why do I walk out along
the bike and inline-skating path when I could have
oak shade
I am thinking about
American
poetry
of
Harold Bloom
Garrison Keillor
a pharisee and a puritan antholo-
gizing it into the human future of a
world that does not have one
not about my grandchild
or
Hawaii
cannot stand to do that
I turn
around where men have made a heap of boulders that
have no right home in the drought-cracked mud flats here and
amid them an only sunflower is working
toward tall and I hear the clamant young voice of
a crow on the woody other bank
why do I
get hello a smile
every young brown woman
of them I meet
not one afoot however
they
go wheeling
away from the last elm in the world
maybe
they know that I have nothing on under
my skin or maybe it is my old Yuma hat
I am looking ahead and not yet back
no matter
I shall be
to the start of ember week and its end though I am not planning
to fast or contemplate and to the temporary misregnum
of the bean king though I do not need a certain period in
which to act the geck and gull or an Illyria
am looking
ahead and not yet back
no matter
I shall be
to all of the
knavery and japery in heated lit rooms though I am not
intending to drink or fuck with the worst of anyone and to
the groans on the morning after twelfth night when every and each
drop off the whirligig of man not time
looking ahead and not
yet back
no matter
I shall be
to walking out alone on the
final morrow that man shall see into a plain of snow and no
wind and having not a word to echo the cold with anymore
A lifelong nonacademic, Rodney Nelson has worked as licensed psychiatric technician, copy editor, and librarian. His poems and narratives have seen print often enough. He made a cameo appearance in the fifty-fourth edition of Who's Who in America. Now Nelson seems to be finding new life in the ezines.