POET OF THE DAY: R.T. SMITH

Rod Smith has been a good friend and fellow traveler for over thirty years. Rod's work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, thePushcart Prize Anthology and New Stories from the South. His most recent collection of poetry, Outlaw Style (Arkansas, 2007), received the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize. His third collection of stories, The Calaboose Epistles, was published by Iris Press in 2009, and he is working on a book-length series of poems about Flannery O’Connor entitled The Red Wolf. He edits Shenandoah and teaches writing and literature at Washington and Lee University.

The Blue Yodel was originally in Gettysburg Review, Storm Warning in Virginia Quarterly Review. They’re both from THE RED WOLF: A DREAM OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR.

To read an interview with Rod Smith, go to http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuethree/rodandjohn3.htm

Beyond the Crepe Myrtles, Blue Yodel

The snake in his new outfit coiled and shivered.

The mockingbird from high in the live oak mocked.

Mama on the porch rocker cleaned her two barrel

and sang how looping a skin over the rail top

might make a stubborn sky shake down a spurt of rain.

No bonbons or violins, but a busy evening

just the same: cornbread, birdsong, sweet potato pie

and the greedy star-glint of a diamondback’s eye.

Roses on the hedge shook like the passing of a ghost.

I scribbled every moment in my Blue Horse book,

a stay-at-home girl dead-set no life’s lesson be lost.

Old Shot ran his knife blade along the guitar neck

till the sweaty steel of six strings quaked and whined.

No prophet happened by to spit out a wisecrack.

Lightning in the key of C, a weapon on the frets.

A yodel quavered in my tongue. Pearls before swine.

Under the bird perch the serpent commenced to climb.

Between the thumb and trigger finger, the silk of time.

Storm Warning

The peacock’s shriek blistering the midnight air,

the roar they always claim mimics a freight train

rounding the bend. Hurricanes south and west,

though too distant to raise concern, but I wake

to the emperor bird crying murder again,

and mother at the door all frazzle and panic

is saying, “The funnel is coming. His vengeance,

girl. We’ve got to barn the livestock and reach

the cellar,” but this time I answer, Animals

be damned, and head for the stairs, my nightgown

shiny with sleep’s friction and now flowing.

In the flecking mirror: my motion’s ghost.

Across the field, an apparition spits its voice.

I give one thought to the files of twined letters

and unfinished fictions, the Royal typewriter

with its twenty-six demons. There are moments

when soul matters less than breath, and I imagine

the frayed pages of savage comedy all swirled

like a magician’s trick, the lame and the halt,

prophets and blessed dimwits all gone to chaos,

every plot giving way to blather and howl.

In the final count, story is just another affliction,

the illusion a grand scheme is within our ken.

With the weather almost sideways, peach trees

losing their blooms, our modest garden shaking

like the Second Coming and the sentry bird gone

who-knows-where, I can hear the Ecclesiast whisper

Vanity, vanity! I have to laugh, till my Parent

pulls me underground and bolts the door. Scent

of clay and mold, decaying spores. Are we

both Persephone now? No lamp or candle,

her feeble prayers our only light in the hour

of our need. “Save us, Our Lady, whose very name

we adore.” Mother says the whirlwind is ever

trumped by the Word, so we listen for a clement

whisper and implore the First Mover to calm

our hearts. Genuflecting for all we’re worth,

we weep like river willows and vow to adore

meek Jesus, while the dark god outside swaggers,

hisses his gospel of annihilation and roars.