B.D.Feil: Four Poems

 

 

I’m A Fool

            It doesn’t matter that I know better

that I know history teaches that history teaches

that history teaches or can feel it undigested

sitting in my bones hollowed out and ignorant

or am graced with the goddamned sense

that God graced a goddamned goose

the itch becomes too great

the death of winter too new

the first green weekend of May too pulling

I dig in slap-happy in rows lost in mulch

wandering amid mounds yet frost teaches

that frost teaches that frost teaches that I’m a fool

Not This God

In my perfecting world

I would release the trees

from the woods

by first cutting the vines

that run up their trunks

and hang to the ground

what god would create the tree

only to slowly strangle it?

not this god

not this god

Giblin’s Grove

Set me down in Giblin’s Grove

the corner closest the coming storm

set me down in open wicker

let the wind sow me

beneath the redbuds

suffer me no pretensions

no need to balance the wicker

on heads of bare-breasted virgins

no hanging of black crape

no systemic scattering

only burn me let me blow

let the wind take me where it will

like the first spring light coaxes

the redbuds from wet winter woods

thirsty to be first tight purple nipples

erupting randomly stubborn to go

Korea 1950-1953

I knew the veterans of that conflict to be a bit lost

office managers filling station owners

door-to-door salesmen scoutmasters

brown shoes with drab green suits on Sunday

five o-clock shadow at eleven a.m.

tape on eyeglasses

missing gas caps

neat but incomplete stacks of National Geographic

living rooms hung with the smell of bacon

cement blocks laying around to no good purpose

Blatz Beer

Tab Cola

always the wait for checks to clear and rides to come

maybe a wife maybe not either way

owners of the ugliest dogs in America

dogs that would never come no matter how loudly called

how insistently how pleadingly

they just would not come



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BD Feil has credits in New Plains Review, Chaffey Review, and Margie. He lives in Michigan with quite the brood.