Winter in St. Augustine
Rent from DeepDyve- Winter in St. Augustine
for my grandmother, Marcena Kenney
Carolina chickadees checker Spanish moss with ribbons of flute-fine melodyin the gray & golden almost-storm light that makes everything, even rottenlemons souring on brittle branches, luminous with possibility. Glad bags sag,the ooze of Christmas dinner & last year's toys put out to make room for newones heavy against their black coruscations. An Indian family slows to ask howmany beaches lie ahead. The ocean—what has not been said of it? That itsmillion-mollusk'd matrimonies of fin & spray, spit & craw overpower the povertyof the mind? Where else but from these foments of swept salt could weclaim generation? Sea oats bend, their green hair teased & blent in blue. The schoolfor the deaf & blind where Ray Charles learned piano's off the island nearmy first love's home on Pine Street. A few blocks west in the summer of '64Andrew Young was beat on the head with a blackjack for making troublein a white-run town. In "What'd I Say" Ray's fingers fly between white & [End Page 25] black so fleet you're halfway back to Arkansas before he even getsto the line. The breakdown hovers between begging & betting, his "hunhs"slow & long then fast & quick on the spumes of the Raelettes' wavingrejection & relent. Born in Albany just across town from my grandmother,he shared her love of fresh strawberries. The way the sun ravishesa bowl in her dining room, I figure he must be eating them in heaven. [End Page 26]
Jason Myers serves as poetry editor of the EcoTheo Review. A National Poetry Series finalist, he has also published work in American Poet, the Paris Review, West Branch, and numerous other journals. He lives outside Austin, Texas, where he works in hospice.
