Val Morehouse: TWO POEMS
CARBON FUTURES
In tar beach tent towns roughnecks cast up,
climbing through muck like blackened grease monkeys
between sumps gummy with acrid crude.
Whole families broke down on the nuts and bolts of production,
earning poverty for their trouble and even
sleeping on ground the Company owned.
In heat that only a rattlesnake could love, and
breeze rank with petroleum funk, they stuck
tents and shanties on ditch backs
like burr scabs on a starving dog,
stalking that next whiskey dollar the way
a lover drinks in an embrace.
Oil owned my family.
Its flare-offs and blowouts they plowed
into a history of mud and fists and cable
song roaring through crops of derricks,
fields they planted for The Man, rigs
drilled like lightning bolts into the dirt.
Ruts and crushed rock fed acres of hulks
raised from dust devils like some hellish corn
grinding ground day and night for a promise
of moisture, the remembered curl of spring-sweet fiddleheads;
for the sound of ancient surf long fallen
into a slurry of shit-black dreams.
In sulphuric fury the tide turned,
gushing back in a rumble of carbon futures,
splits of gas, and diesel, and kerosene
oozing blood of machines,
banking the metallic stink of money into
the sweaty cents of escape.
8/2007
BLOWOUT
Centuries wax and wane above these damp will-o-the-wisps,
spirits, diatoms squeezed of soul by time’s closing fist.
Anticlines rise and rock their trillion skeletons to sleep.
Even Gaia’s hands close in one last amen over the salty dead.
Dark domes of decayed and deserted corpses drop
into secret amphora corked with stone.
Gathering a ghostly jewelry, a richness of
glassy stars, beads, circles, boats, and wings,
their silica bones crush and condense in
aromatic perfume impressed
and cradled inside the hoops of limestone.
Against all odds, one random
tremor expresses old genealogy the way
a fault line slips into the memory of movement.
The way feathers of carbon and oxygen unchained
at last hiss through dry seams of shale,
the dead erupt from that smoky crevasse between earth and sky.
Like angels the old ones soar into life
through tons of mud and midnight detritus on wings
flaring with the hellfire of a new star.
9/2007
Val Morehouse
Copyright © 2008
