Earthly Things

for Andrew Hudgins

My mother thinks I should be baptized
to remedy an earlier oversight. Like being
a Mason, it makes good business sense
to her. "Some employers want to see
your baptismal certificate, you know,
so it's always good to have one."

I'm 16, and our church sprinkles babies.
Now, I wish that we'd been Baptists.
Back then, I kneel before the pastor,
tragic gray-faced man who makes me
think of Scofield as Saint Thomas More.

He pours the water from a silver bowl,
through my hair and down my suit front,
wipes my forehead with a white cloth
like an old-time waiter's towel.
In his great voice, he says words to clothe
the mystery Nicodemus got so wrong.
Mother, am I ready for the world
now, resume in hand?


Autumn Song: Pathetic Verity

It's the season of gold and blood,
whose intricate frescos might almost
tell a human tale, the old one
about the flesh and spirit. The beech tree
sifts its coins through knotted fists;
the dogwood turns to a fountain
of blood, becomes shorthand
for Medea, Tarquin, the Son of Sam.
Or the obverse of that well-worn coin—
tree of the Crucifixion made
Lamb of God. In the golden afternoons,
our tongues roll round
appropriately Latinate syllables:
impasto, imprimatura….

Might almost tell the tale,
but doesn't. Neither Van Eyck
nor Pollock, abstract and inexpressive,
it's the season of colored sugar water,
the placebo we drink with our eyes
against the coming blankness,
that long dry spell in the marrow.


Military Transport En Route to Germany, January 2003

The Japanese maple seems armed
with tiny warheads: red
nosecones prow the raw air.

At thirty thousand feet,
the transport out of Dobbins*
hauls a two-mile contrail behind,

like a backswimmer trailing
its improbably long wake:
malicious bug,

lustrous as gold,
its belly large
with an embassy of blood.

*U.S. Airforce base near Atlanta, Georgia

^

Biography

My poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, The Formalist, Antietam Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Mediphors, The Literary Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Writer's Journal, Slant, and over fifty other literary magazines. Recent publications include Red River Review; War, Literature & the Arts; and Avocet. Work is forthcoming in Tar River Review and Riverrun. Swallowed Up in Victory, a long narrative poem based on the American Civil War, was published by White Mane Books in 2002. I work as a senior technical writer and teach English part-time at Georgia Perimeter College. I also act as senior literary editor for Atlanta Review magazine.