Inland with Coastal Weather, and: I Am A Boy Under Trees

INLAND WITH COASTAL WEATHER / Art Homer They're ocean, sheets in wind. Clothespins work like lovers loose from their springs. A bird sings in rain outside the single bedroom window. On the taut line a young boy's hands jump as chickens flap out their last blood. His family can't stay in their own yard but what years come through the gate where nails multiply around the hinges' weak hold. The boy is soon a lover, stunned white by a woman's body, water-round in rock beneath a waterfall. Festive birds excite a sunlit pool, rays of gliding fry. Friend in the stiff leaves of summer, wind lifts a hair behind my ear. I have left the house of sheets in wind, moved past forests of women in rock pools, and out into this time of year. Damn all friends who do not travel well in rain. If sand forgets water daily, wind will not remind. I abandon dry motels travelers never reach the estimated hour of vacancy. Take rain's itinerary: AU points here to surf, great sheets flapping from the coastline. The Missouri Review · 25 I AM A BOY UNDER TREES / Art Homer Winged ants, thick as apple blossoms, dance all spring from stumps, water shoots arcing from the roots. Crouched on a stump . . maybe a new kind of frog, I think of tadpoles, how they keep their tails after legs come. Blue bellied lizards don't stand like this, squat, scales ratcheting around the body, licking up a hive of ants. The lizard grows steadily as the sun, somewhere over Georgia. Morning works closer as ages slip through the body of all things. Shrimp-like in ponds, mosquito and salamander hatch. Mayflies dry their wings and things become other things. In the womb all of us crawl the years until our kind, slipping from hair-faced dog to man. My mistake was not bad—to take the lizard for a frog. Tm not the only judge. Snakes wait to catch the fat ones sunning, leave their own skins and soft eggs in the yard. I hold the white, grape-sized germs up to light and watch the whip-tailed sons of snakes twist like burning hair. Under trees, wind. Leaf shadows crawl into one another— or away. Two snakes meet. I can't tell which one is eating. I know before birth we are all fed through the navel. Is that all I was? a kind of dimpled bean? But life is in the wind. Men come with axes, girdling the trees. They strip to the waist in sun, woodchips sticking to red skin above their belts. The white wood under bark is the cleanest thing I'll ever see, purer than the reason second growth stands dead protecting newly planted stands of pine. A boy's a water sprout, the root a soft lie to start in. Birds don't sing of loss 26 · The Missouri Review when men kill trees and rain drives through empty branches, when every hawk and crow can see the nest. All men do is plan. A boy runs into evening. Sun has left the south for Texas, the Mississippi a band of light it crossed—as driving west, in miles of orchards, you pass a lane where trucks pick up loaded boxes. Out on the two lane you see the three-way march of trees open. You look for a house, maybe see it. If not, the house is there, and boys who angle off as men. Unlike them, or like the birds, once driven out of what they loved, they don't come back again. Art Homer The Missouri Review · 27 ...