​​Traveling Mercies 

All the cats that didn’t make it--
the raccoons, chagrined possums,
wind-ruffled tails of flattened squirrels,
the torn black snake
weathering into the sidewalk--
serve to remind that this world is not safe
for runners and other living things.
 
Crawling on recon through the Asian jungle
taught my neighbor Jack
the least sound meant death,
which is why he woke
under his bed at midnight,
the pounding of his heart louder
than the fading rumble of the motorcycle tearing up the block.
 
Listening to his wife tell mine that story recalled
another neighbor, years before, young and sweet-faced,
and the pounding I heard through the walls
night after night. One afternoon, I found her on the stoop
with a claw hammer battering a poor warped
chunk of 2x4 to death.
Why, I asked. My therapist said
to do this when I couldn’t take it anymore.
Blesséd be that 2x4.
 
And over lunch last week,
a friend told me about a turtle
he’d passed on the interstate that morning
calmly high-stepping through four lanes of traffic, had watched
in his rearview mirror as far as the grassy median,
last seen hell-bent to cross four more lanes
and carry on.
Their sense of direction is terrific, says my friend, so
if you help one cross the road,
always take him the way he was pointed.
I’ll remember that, I tell him. And I do--
 
this morning, where the road below the junior high
bottoms out beside the creek bend,
already past the corner where on evening runs
I’ve heard the click of car door locks
at the traffic light.
At dawn the long downhill stretch is so still
that the world seems cleansed of all our demons--
when there he is, a lumbering Christmas platter,
snout in the air, stout legs churning as I slow to let him pass.
Hail fellow, well met.
May there be
travelling mercies for us all.


by Contributing Poet  David E. Poston   Copyright © 2023 
VWP 2023     First published in  Bearers of Distance (Eastern Point Press, 2013)
and in his collection Slow of Study (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2015).
 


Loosely Translated From a Japanese Movie, or So I Thought 

Last name Zilla, first name God,
please come stomp hell out of everyone . . .
Jesus living in Waco, TX, wearing glasses?  
No friggin’ way!  Speaking of Jesus, how come 
he won't do miracles anymore, like
turning David Copperfield into a serpent
--or my rod into a flowering staff . . . ?
Once, dowsing for inspiration, I began to suspect
that smoothness was art and density could well
pass for design: say, jars of dill pickles 
on a dusty shelf in a bonecool basement in
1968 when I am sneaking a few puffs
on a stale Winston, thinking about the war
in my living room called Vietnam where
I just watched the grim-faced babies blow shotguns 
with their M-16s, red-eyed grunts hunched 
in the colors of the jungle, mouths shaping angelic o's, 
blowing kisses through blue steel--before I turned
the channel and found you, 
last name Zilla, first name God.  Amen.


by Contributing Poet  David E. Poston   Copyright © 2020 
VWP 2020     First published in  The Main Street Rag 3, 3 (Fall 1998)  

Bio:  David E. Poston  is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Postmodern Bourgeois Poetaster Blues (which won the North Carolina Writers' Network's Randall Jarrell Chapbook Competition), and the full-length collection Slow of Study. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Broad River Review, Cider Press Review, Flying South, and North Carolina Literary Review. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a co-editor of Kakalak.