Old Redemption

1
Dead farmer of earth,
the armadillo lay curled in a hollow stump.
Almost victorious, no scars
engraved his armor, though his kin
spill like drunks across dotted lines
as speeding car radios bump
nonstop to top forty pop.

Fifty million year old fragment,
Mayan legend fashioned you
to humble unruly gods.
So many dusks, your grub feet
have left me close to prayer.

2
All dawn my father and I walked
amid spring’s offerings, honeysuckle
thickening across our tired legs.
Deer appeared ahead of us, lofting velvet bodies
behind red oaks, crackling motion and leaves.
We settled our backs on pine bark.
I didn’t dare mention the job my father had quit on a whim
when talk of suburban drainage became too much.
Soon his hands stroked a poplar turkey box call
with the same slow skill I imagined once
conceived my life out of a thin hallway.

In a rye grass lane, gobbles echoed.
We treaded through hackberry and pine,
tracking earth down the long throat of ancestral sound.
Father, I wanted to say,
Whatever desires we have,
Let us stay here, now, forever

3.
We amid cypress knobs splashed,
the reptilian tops of cottonwoods
laughed green above our wet heads
and drowned your brown eyes in tears
as we slid like leaves over the chipped green
of the flipped John-boat, giving bodies
to the summer’s stale water and swimming
for shore through cane poles, Bud Light cans,
moss green and wet as our groins.

“Who cares?” you, no longer scared,
yelled after losing a cellular phone
as we slugged our Nikes in the shade
of a beech tree and ancient fish beds.
We stripped in afternoon sun,
sacrificed our equipment and drove home,
half naked and laughing about whatever
we’d regained from that place fallen back there.

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