Benjamin Pryor is from Maggie Valley, NC, and he studied at UNC Greensboro and the University of Florida. His poems have appeared in The Oxford American, The Southern Review, Oxford Magazine, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The North Carolina Literary Review, and Main Street Rag, and work is forthcoming in Cimarron Review and Pataphysica. He currently lives with his son in Chapel Hill and works as a network administrator in Durham.
We link along the road,
the rain sucks in our shoes.
October colors code,
but hemlocks still hang blue.
I kiss your lips, dark shine
where ferns unglue.
Our cabin slakes off ice
and cows move cheek to cheek.
The pipes have frozen twice,
our calloused hands are weak.
The black ax is a sign
of days—no speech.
Your hands slice up the beets
and scrub the kitchen down.
Our chanterelles and tea
are not enough. We drown
the marriage hard in wine
and stain the sheets.
The rain slakes down our sleeves,
we stop along the road.
You clutch your belly, breathe,
the baby hanging low.
The yellow poplar spines
let down their leaves.
Be a euglena in the darkness, whipping
your tail,
or a paramecium of pygmy hairs, rowing in the unseen.
Expect less from the world. Always assume.
Have the sort of under-glance
that is nearly without conscience,
the eyes of a dog digging a backyard hole.
You will be surprised at the divinity
of the commonplace. Oaf, juvenile, egoist.
Be unafraid—be an uncouth dummy
with something naïve to prove.
Concentrate on the middle distance,
beyond presence or gaze.
Death's crystalline irony will be
a mother greater than precarious life,
the rusted tin can cradling the orchid.
The original is the tingling of a tooth.
© Benjamin Pryor 2006.
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2000-2006.
