THOMAS BATES (back home)

After the Messiah Came and Went (2River View 6.2)

There were no more horses to live by

heart pine barns my grandfather built

on the dead earth of East Colorado.

It was winter. Snowflakes fell and melted

on tongues of Gringo children like manna,

their mothers hollering breakfast from stone

buildings white with hoarfrost. Jim Cartwright

held the county seat, and nobody seemed

to know the difference. The air in our house

was sweet Wednesday mornings, hallelujah,

the weekly Bellevue Baptist praise meeting

come again to our kitchen with country hymns,

hash browns, hominy. My father kept tempo

with the fat Cuban heels of his cowboy boots

so you could feel it on the porch as you walked in,

throw up a quick hoot, Amen, and ask your pleasure.

This was the treasure none of them knew about:

the tobacco-black chitin of a horse fly

I kept hidden in an empty cigar tube I carried in my pocket,

the last of its kind. Its eyes were a strange lime,

and every time I looked I started to believe

my young body was only happening. I once showed it

to Bill Jenkins’ boy, the one who drowned in Pawnee creek

last summer, said it was terrible dead, I don't remember.

I found him laid out on a low shelf in his daddy’s barn,

naked, his skin was beautiful, I couldn’t even tell,

his body in the hard shape of a cross so when I lifted

myself on top of him, arms outstretched, shins folded,

it was a double crucifixion. I remember how the thing was soft

and there were murmurs and I thought I heard God move

in the frictionless air. But it was the distant song of the morning crowd

lifted in prayer, pulled from a kitchen with down home

smells of poached eggs and pepper bacon, Jesus, Jesus

there was some other noise, a dull buzz

just beyond the boy’s slow mouth, green eyes

full of death and singing. I am the last of my species.

No, Brother, I Did Not See (Pif Magazine 2002; Verse Monthly 2002) 

When we were small and lived in that blue house

with the hyacinths wrapped around it, kissing me

you said, When we are old, we will be afraid to die.

Then the cowbird, who lately had come to rest on our roof

hot afternoons like some Southwestern gargoyle,

set himself to cawing. I don't know what it was,

but you twisted your body up on to the awning,

cocked your fist, and let a smooth stone fly.

When the thing fell, you told me it grew and grew

until it was nothing left but hell the whole sky, look

you can't see anything, and somehow I knew you were right,

though I heard the hollow bones crack into themselves,

the empty black oyster crash among the garden;

that awful dead smell pouring from the cloister

sweet as frankincense, heavy as a new day

that falls into dusk too soon. We are sleeping

on the porch swing together with the smell of hyacinths,

a thousand birds springing from that one blood that saves us

every night. Here, I will look the other way for you.

Satisfaction (Eye Dialect 2002)
I scare easy

in Pagosa Springs some evenings

just before a storm hits,

hide my sick body under dry rock

and watch as the hollyhocks

purple and bear up,

turn their song toward the firmament.

What with all the lightning

and this great big field,

a fellow could be more than unashamed

to lie down and grind his jeans into the dirt,

take the red knee howling with him back to town,

blame it on an old wound, and laugh

though everybody knows it.

The rain hangs straight like a chemise,

does not stoop to meet the ground.

If I stretch, I can almost touch it,

save the fear of getting wet

and the very loss of it.

Every day my life evaporates,

every day the rifts between my fingers grow.

I snap a hollyhock at the stem.

Its petals are a dead-skin blister in my teeth,

soft and unafraid.

I play it like a perforated bone.

Sources of Knowledge (Melic Review 2001)
This river won't say when

it started. I know.

Two thousand years ago or so

some curious Moses struck a rock

with an aspen branch

he had whittled down to a neat point.

People say it was a serpent's tooth,

that the rock was a forbidden tree,

and all this river knowledge,

but I am too young to remember.

Things I do remember:

falling asleep in a pew,

head resting on my mother's lap,

cold and full of God like Mary's,

what must have been an awful penetration

when the spirit struck and hollowed out

her virgin body, sharpening the boy;

lying still among aspens

on a Sunday afternoon, late April,

carving a stick against a leg of a stone bridge

so the sap leaks out,

listening to the river,

quiet while a pretty girl walks near in a thin dress,

passes right over me.

I look up and see the blood.

Hymn for Heritage Days (2River View 6.2)

This afternoon sings us with the indelible

mysteries of the mother tongue— tortillas, seared chiles—

and with the sacred syllables of local myths:

two ghosts haunt Poudre Canyon; water sprite

in Horsetooth, spirit of a drowned college girl;

Cheyenne spring water cures syphilis.

And here, just minutes west of Severance,

beyond the slaughter house and the low yellow barn

of the talking horse, the song extends itself

to ruder melodies of Ute drums and bad bluegrass,

the bold aroma of roasted corn.

A Mestizo boy pitches one, two balls and lands

his father square in the dunk tank, well worth

his mother’s five dollars to satisfy an Oedipal urge,

splashes water so high it drizzles on the chile cart

where a whistling griddle tends the family business.

You know, somewhere on this great

Southwestern slab, from the summit of Long’s Peak

to the bottom of the reservoir, the song

sinks into us like a sunburn or a lover, calling us

from the shades of superstition to a day

when we may forgive our fathers and step

from out these painted canopies into the sun.

Bertha's Hollow (Melic Review 2001)
We have decided to amputate this thing,

the long, black trunk with its magnificent bend

now gourded out to winter,

the brittle, split shell that threatens to crack and kill

our children on some summer holiday.

A spot has been cleared in the field behind the old house

stuffed with relatives interned for the weekend

come to watch the axes broken out and sent against

one seasonally beautiful life.

The winter sun is brutal and anemic,

it sheds the clouds and throws its sick light

like goose feathers hanging from the sky.

This thing we are cutting is umbilical,

some branch that fills the world up.

Killing Cattle, Greeley, 1998 (Stirring 2002)

The pregnant mother beside me crouches, sputters

and I know something awful about Wednesdays

spent in heat. I explain the sweet smell

is courtesy of the clover and the vats of cattle guts

boiling into a thin, red paste

like sex coiled and evaporated on the hips

of some retreated lover. I am reminded of my mother,

eyes thick as rubies baked and split

over my birth, squatting me out.

But this one is slip-knot flesh and bone.

I can see her ribs pinching out above a great lap,

can see through the sack, twin calves,

their spines as sharp as uncut jewels, a sharp

hollow shank on this one and dangling from the other

what looks to be a penis, both have legs.

I am jealous of her, that she can synthesize the beating

of three hearts, find mirth at some internal quake.

Solomon would set her in half. I would take the one

with hazel eyes, a long neck and strong forehead thick with black

hair that will crease and boil to vinegar. She would take

the thin one, transparent and all cartilage,

the beautiful, caramelized one that sticks to the insides of the pot

and cleans when it slides out.

Letter to a Hit-and-run Motorist (Nieve Roja 2002)

I am writing to let you know

I believe in you despite the claims

of carelessness made against you

I was standing at the four-way

when the milk truck flipped

and the bottles burst like scared chickens

I saw you swerve to miss the kid

holding the screwdriver

to his own throat

the headless steel post

and the flat red octagon

flashing in the middle of the road

Despite the circumstances

sometimes it is important for us

to understand our limits

at these rustic intersections

we must accept the events

and not turn back