Three Poems by Eric Anderson

And Still We Gather

beach chairs topple
for no one I love
drag the waters
just as space curves
I’m wearing my favorite shirt
no else
no edges

 

Concussed by a Club of a Hundred Feathers

white is my headwhite
and vocaling
and mounted
round saddle
burst
only touch the swollen side
only milk in it a minute
and occipitate
and stay upright
with all the red nubs
worked down
Try naming the bones
this color
the last mouth you remember

 

from Good Death Will Come and Drink the Rabbit Water

& last light Pilgrim of Pine Island, of my truck bed, bled out, seizing

a constellation ahead, guiding us, aiming at southern states to poison, dip

its arrows in, & me & Missouri in the front seat, low country road

necropolitan path

trying to find a place, safe, to take Pilgrim, as time, like as sick, crawls

in the kid’s limbs & we couldn’t see, separate, his red from the cranium toxin

canebrake

unwound ribbon of prairie grass rattle, Crotalus horridus, hidden

in overgrowth

in eyeshine

& I’ve seen just how quick the venom can go make a kid come aswamp

fix its justice from ankle to apex, Odessa, Harmony, Willow, into Jerico

I hit the roads with All-Wheel making the dust kick up white

poltergeist us

like history’s totality heel-stuck after a decent jam session in the jakes

an A chord, aching, long after the song’s been unpinned, brought in with the linen

when you hear that coffin sound you best know I’m six feet down

when we feel now quivered round, when by

Sagittarian bend

Missouri, in the front seat, she says to me, says, Sugarboy, you know

what’s coming is coming to cry aim, coming with rumble, with war drums

to the flutes

to the moment

like a fleet of rafts rocking, all taking a swallow of the shallow water

so much in sleep, men & women sweating, mouths like broken

Coca-Cola bottles

too many colors, coming by grave, chapel, cornfield, killing floor, & she’s right

to want to go, to keep to high beam, leave behind how the way, the fire, how

the last propane tank took first