Michael Brockley is this week’s featured poet. He is a retired school psychologist who worked for 33 years in Adams and Wells Counties. His poems have appeared in such publications as Flying Island, Tipton Poetry Journal, Clementine Unbound, Panoplyzine, Jokes Review, Third Wednesday, Atticus Review, and Gargoyle. In addition, Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan and Local News: Poetry about Small Towns are among the anthologies which have included Brockley’s work.
The Poet Regrets Retirement While Studying a Raccoon Skull by the Side of a Trail at the Base of a Hollowed Out Sycamore Tree
I eavesdrop on tourist conversations about dowsing for water and a ghost town haunted by a stage coach driver hanged by a mob. The raccoon skull I dragged from the sycamore is pale, scoured by the way time ravished and raises life on a flood plain. The eye sockets are empty. My career has vanished into the memories old men carve into their erratic moods. Anagram puzzle solutions and the definition of “pinwheel” stored now among madras shirts and scenes from the Man with No Name movies. I examine the emptiness in the dead mammal’s skull. The slope of the brainpan long and shallow for a creature so clever. Among our group, the trail guide catalogs plant names, companions for my trip back to a drafty house on a street not named for a saint or an outlaw. Reed canary grass, lizard’s tail, smartweed. I watch my finger pass behind a clearweed stem while my shadow falls across the plant’s path. Late caterpillars cling to wild cucumber leaves. In the morning, I will awaken to abandoned agendas from the due dates of my working life’s labors. I will notice my maple has not turned red mid-way through October but the leaves it has shed are crimson. On the trail someone tells a joke about rattlesnakes. The tour guide warns against trusting nature. What will I make of myself now that I am no longer me.
Smartweed
Curt Burnette led the Rainbow Bottom hike in October. He is standing by one of the giant sycamore trees that is there.
A Self-Portrait of the Ceylon Bridge
Tiffany visits the Ceylon Bridge whenever her Fort Wayne oldies station plays “Come and Get Your Love.” she has bound her name into hearts above Alex, Kirk, and Loki. Beneath the word “Redbone” spray painted on the wall above the spot on the floorboards where the body summoned by a teenage seance fell from the ceiling into the shadows that cover the floor. The ash trees across the river bed have been hollowed and bored by emerald beetles, and the frogs that once sang evening love songs along the bank have migrated across the road in pursuit of mosquitos and no-see-ums. Now when she arrives at dusk, chanting the chorus in the voice she has huskied from a Virginia Slims habit, Tiffany sprays elaborate valentines on the bare spaces left on the sideboards by Sam and Kacey and Jason and Holly. She signs “What’s the matter with your mind, with your sign?” And twirls in the space where the darkness and the sunlight meet as Lolly Vegas celebrates what the heart wants. As the doves in the rafters look over Tiffany’s shoulders to see if they recognize the new name.
Friends of the Limberlost 