ALTA SUB TERRA
Writings from Underground
POETRY
I Tell You What
By Moses Howl
In Commemoration of Alta Sub Terra's Inaugural Issue
For your own good, forgive me, burying forget me
Spending neither petal nor stone, bless your hearts
In the daring fanlight, humid darkness of mourning
One thing I'll say, when I was a child, the pumpkin
Truck would go bump'n down the road like marbles
Sooey-up! That's Sawyer
For ya, hymns of harvest
Prayers in an imagination ol' Kentucky, Heav'n 'n'
Momma's kitchen want you to think, the sole view
Through holes is up, the boots and bottoms of bare
Feet hour, the dirt in the eye show, around six-thirty
Children feed the chickens 'n' dogs while granddad's
pipe smoke drifts through
walls and rattles the planks
Savoring the clothesline 'n' apple crumble pie steam
Momma recalls stories about how great-great-grand-
Ma split a deck of cards with a cleaver, over euchre
Which ain't nearly as funny cuz she got poor Nester
On the next recital, momma wonders none of them
Boards was ever lifted, what's under there, nobody
A coarse knot, gram's old books, hand to the bible
Stirr’n chick'n 'n' dumplings would know except'n
Ol' Granddad owns both ax 'n' floor, and Kentucky
Boys love their mommas
Way down in the muddy
Roots of their souls, where it would surprise them
To find God's mercy and gaze upon endless rivers
As plump with trout as uncle Don when he spoke
against momma's spatch-
cock breasts, seasoned
Over what great-great-grandma ever would have
Tolerated, he declared, ol' bumpkin, to the rust
On his pickup truck, hauling big, educated ideas
Silencing the katydids with a chew-spit motor
You could see how you'd start to see floorboards
That way, forgetting to be a forgiving neighbor
To your own kin, a body
Imagines velvet 'n' dead
Carnations, daydreaming like beetles with a baby
In the cordwood, there you are, in odd flickering
Motion, picture odors of headstones, dark cherry
Flare on the ax-head as midnight roosters crow