Introduction
Larry D. Thomas, a former Texas Poet Laureate, is a true friend of Right Hand Pointing. Larry doesn't publish much in online journals, and yet his poems have appeared in many issues of RHP and this is his 11th online chapbook with us. It's an honor that Larry entrusts his work to us. As a point of personal privilege, I will say that a wonderful part of my life as an editor has been to develop relationships with several people who are my favorite poets. Larry is one of those.
Larry's work is not typical of what appears at RHP. I'm not smart enough to be able to articulate how it's atypical, but it is. The poems are thoroughly Texan, and thoroughly American. They are accessible, but with no hint of the compromise that accessibility sometimes requires. What I think I love most about Larry's work is the exquisite sensitivity to the lives of people. People we might think of as common and ordinary, but who are anything but. We've published Larry's work about miners, war veterans, and all sorts of people who live outside the mainstream of society.
The poems in Pecos are human-and-dog poems, presented here in spite of our ban on pet poems. Have you had enough human-and-dog poems? Right. Me neither.
I'm reminded of Mark Doty's wonderful book, Dog Years: A Memoir, about two dogs who were with him and his partner as the partner died of AIDS. And then, of course, the dogs died, and there was more grief for Doty.
Dogs die, and that presents a problem. (People die too, but I'd rather not talk about that right now.) In 2007, I attended a reading Doty did from Dog Years at the Harvard Bookstore. During the Q&A, a man admitted he was puzzled that dog owners develop these deep bonds with their dogs and then go through terrible grief when their dogs die and then they turn around and get more dogs and on the cycle goes.
Everyone in the room chuckled except Mark Doty who, without hesitation, said "You know, the agreement to participate in this life is a pact with grief."
Here's what I took home from that. The agreement to participate in this life is a pact with grief.
I know you'll enjoy this little collection of 10 poems from our friend Larry D. Thomas.
Dale Wisely
in memory of Beefy, my loyal Shetland Sheepdog,
&
for Pecos, my loyal Long-haired Chihuahua
"All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers,
is contained in the dog."
Franz Kafka
Flush
Cleatus sits on the shack porch,
arching the sand with the dangling heel
of his boot. Pecos, his retired cow dog,
lies flush against Cleatus' outer thigh,
fighting the proverbial demon of sleep.
Cleatus' hand, buried in Pecos' fur,
rises and falls with Pecos' breathing.
As he feels for Pecos' heartbeat,
he feels instead his own, throbbing
in a cage of ribs they've shared
since Pecos was a puppy.
Pecos
First light startles him
as if it were the scent
of a jackrabbit.
He stretches his blue merle,
arthritic legs,
rolls over on his stomach,
and rises to his paws
slowly as the red-orange sun'll
heave itself over the horizon.
He eases to the side
of Cleatus' half-bed,
sniffs Cleatus' breath,
and jumpstarts him awake
with the slobbery, swirling
battery of his tongue.
Fur
Each morning,
when Cleatus gazes
into his bathroom mirror,
he notices the increasing
bushiness of his eyebrows
and the lengthening hairs
on the tops of his ears
and on his earlobes.
As he and Pecos
begin their morning walk
side by side, each moves
with a slight gimp
indistinguishable from that
of the other, a slight gimp
stemming from a touch
of arthritis. The fur of each
gleams with morning sun
like the filaments in light bulbs
heated to incandescence,
these two aged creatures
on their walk in the desert,
set apart but by the number
of their furred, rickety legs.
Grub
For their jerky,
Cleatus slices beef into strips
for drying in the sun.
He boils pinto beans
in an old black pot
once the favorite of his mother,
an old black pot
lumpy as homemade soap.
Cleatus cherishes his mother's
cast-iron skillet, especially
the way he never has to wash it;
the way, with nothing
but heat in the oven,
it works its magic,
turning meal, eggs, buttermilk,
lard, baking soda,
and a pinch of salt
into the steaming,
brittle miracle of cornbread.
Thorns
The big thorns
hardened on a branch
of dead mesquite
are only seemingly the nastiest.
Cleatus' heart muscle still smarts
from the thick, long memory-thorns
of his dead wife's stillness:
of Smoke, the best cow horse
he ever had till he angrily
ran him down the slope
of an arroyo too rocky and steep,
fracturing Smoke's leg
beyond any hope of healing:
the thick, long, memory-thorns
dwarfing the deep ones
which took pliers
to pull from the pads of Pecos.
Ice Fog
On cold mornings,
Cleatus reminisces about
the three-day ice fog.
He still hears mesquite
and ocotillo branches
cracking from trunks
and distant power poles
snapping like matchsticks.
He had but Smoke and Pecos
to help him herd cattle to shelter
and still sees Pecos running
in and out of view, tightening
an illusory rope around the herd:
Pecos running in and out of view,
whooshing like a tireless
blue phantom.
is the orange-red sun
sliding into the darkness
like legs into long johns
on cold winter nights.
Doctors and drugs, to Far
West Texans, are anathemas.
Like old cow dogs who wander
deep into the pasture to die
beneath a swirl of merciful vultures,
old cowhands who take sick
just take sick, rest as much
as possible, and swill
a little whiskey for pain.
Cleatus' dad's old dog, Blue,
who eked out a hard life
of eighteen years, lay dead
in the pasture for weeks
before two cowhands found him.
It was as if old Blue
planned it that way
to ease the grief of Cleatus' dad,
old Blue mostly desert
by the time they spotted him,
barely enough bones for a grave.
Death
Rose
On the floor, on a folded
saddle blanket beside the head
of Cleatus' bed, Pecos snores.
Jerking awake, Cleatus squints
and then opens and closes
his eyes several times, to focus.
He thinks he sees
in the moonglow,
beneath Pecos' nose,
a faint, misshapen rose,
a rose but a blush of pink,
a rose so faint it's
scarcely there at all.
Cleatus Muses
the moon which tonight
makes Pecos cast a shadow
so dark Cleatus thinks he sees it spasm.
When full, its light stuns the shack
like the laying on of frosty hands,
blessing man and dog or waking them
to a netherworld where they reel,
caring less whether it's the bright
light of death or simply another day
graced with the staticky transmission
of "Waiting 'Round to Die."*
(song by Townes Van Zandt)
First Light Creeps
into the shack, surreptitious
as the onset of dementia.
Each gratuitous morning,
in marvelous minutes,
lengthens the time
Cleatus and Pecos find themselves
strangely suspended in a state
half-sleep and half-wakefulness.
The cataracts, clouding
and suffusing their lenses with light,
enhance the strangeness
of the purgatorial state:
the state of sleep-waking:
the strangeness of floating
through the fleece-like
clouds of rapture.
Larry D. Thomas has published several award-winning collections of poetry including As If Light Actually Matters: New & Selected Poems which received a 2015 Writers' League of Texas Book Awards Finalist citation. He lives in the high Chihuahuan Desert of Far West Texas with his wife and two long-haired Chihuahuas. Among his best friends are the Chihuahuan raven, puma, great horned owl, coyote, javelina, mule deer, gray fox, Texas horned lizard, thick-handed scorpion, black-tailed jackrabbit, diamondback rattlesnake, and blue quail.
MAIN PAGE