|
Poems from the Drink House... |
|
Order a copy now. $1 plus $3 shipping = $4.00 |
|
Send your check to:
Liberty Quill Publications P.O. Box 4886 Wilmington, N.C. 28406
Be sure to provide name and address for shipment. Or by email:
|
|
DRINK HOUSE MOON
(For James Green)
Down the highway by the sound, We drove out to the shanty town with floorboards patched, tarpaper shacks and Daley’s Hotel, The moonshine haunts for restless crowds —unwanted at the Ocean Pavilion. But for a boy with broom stick and eager ears, the tales you told were keen as Disney.
I heard your motorcycle racing on the asphalt, Saw your pilot’s cap and goggles, The hawksbill knife you carried; All night drinking out a young man’s dream, The jukebox beat, the wail and saxophone, The sweaty dance that sent you reeling in the shadows; The engine’s shotgun roar, from the tailpipe firing sparks like bullets, And you furiously racing over broken clay and smoothly crushed oyster shells; Past sixty in the curve, you thought about the hot noonday sun In 1941 in the tobacco when you were a boy, and Evalena, Evalena, dark and mysterious Evalena. Then she slid into the bend, tumbled almost soundlessly, And left you there for dead. All that night you heard the engine, Saw headlights, delirious moonbeams, passing in the woods.
Years later, after Miami and the Great Lakes, New York’s Harlem, You read Isaiah through and through, And told that story to a white boy down on the waterfront. Then, blue jacket and bow tie, Now thinking of your children, You stood beside the altar at St. Mary’s, Softly chanting verses like a monk.
And sometime later, you went back to see where you had been; In that clapboard shack, you drank With Biggy from Midnight Branch, Poured whiskey in your cup again, Remembering the girl who you called —Moonshine.
|
