New Historians
New Historians
pore through the past
writing check lists
for the present
and a wish list
for the future.
This is not history.
This is the only history
worth extending.
Poetry
The Back 40, Martin’s House, 1968
When you ask me
where the boy went
I listen
with the ears he left me.
He’s not here
in the sounds we each inherit
or the dinner down the hall
that sniffs around our room.
I have to catch him
past you
through the paler square of paint
through the nail hole
that bore
a former tenant’s portrait.
He’s alone there
still
beneath the slant-roofed ceiling
peeling slivers of old […]
Cross Talk
Cross Talk
Left hanging
will be a saying
in the destined nation
a millennia or two since my aching feet
and palms are ripped from this rare piece of reused tree.
I thirst
for better revelations
than bumper stickers promising
to free machines from their manifest sins. Sorry
friends. No rapture will come to your four-horsemen town.
I am that I am
a haggard rabbi with no […]
Wisconsin defined
This obscenity of cheese.
Shot deer out for a cartop ride.
Tongues stuck out from the truckbeds.
The peculiar habits of the Northern
Red-necked, Beer-gutted Xenophobe
Trolling the green for swarthy shades.
And abject depression of a whole state
On Monday morning when the gods
Lose Sunday to foreign mortals.
January 2008, © joesmith
