M L Williams – Red River Valley

Wind so strong I stopped the car

and looked up at a cliff outside Wichita Falls

and the spray of dust, dusk closing in,

and then again headed north and someway

crossed the Red River without knowing

how far I was from Byrdtown

driving from Georgia to Colorado Springs

to meet a fabric artist who found me online,

without knowing I’d crossed that river

or that its flow bled just north

of where my father was born

and where his father’s mule and wagon

hauled to the south bank

to float the cotton they grew

downriver in barges to the Gulf.

Because I was oblivious, I have to imagine

the red tint of the current I didn’t stop to see

and the dirt roads and plank shacks

like one they shivered in all winter

or pressing gauze on boll-pricked fingers

or huddling around the stove, boiled beans

with onions in an iron pot, collard greens,

a pan of warm biscuits, but I don’t need

to imagine the hard wind, the sting

of dust in my eyes. I stopped

and stepped out into it without knowing.

---

Narcolepsy

Burned black as coal
countless rise, dead souls
in the dead of night
from the atomic bombing mandala.
—Yamaguchi Tsutomu

Sleeping on the couch in a baseball cap
in front of Nana’s television, his breath
heavy, almost snoring, my uncle dreams
of long fly balls, I suppose, or nails—he is
a roofer—, or birds—he has an aviary,
raises canaries and cockatiels and shows them,
wins awards. We talk about him
as if he isn’t there, joke that he falls
asleep mid-sentence, so maybe he
dreams of the sentence’s end,
and because no one can recall how it started,
his dream must be like being stuck
in a poem, an exquisite corpse, perhaps,
enjambment as finale.

Years later I learn of an infidelity
and suppose he may have been dreaming
of his youth, falling in love
with his brother’s wife, who became his,
and I learn he served on a dive bomber,
so he may have dreamed of flight,
engines screaming, green islands
in the glittering Pacific erupting
fire and earth and death. His obituary
mentions love of birds and his fame
in that community, his World War II medals,
his heroism, that he was on the ground
in Nagasaki the day after it was bombed.
He never talked about the war or Japan,
so now I must suppose that every sentence
his sleep interrupted could only end in nightmare
on a couch in front of a black and white TV.

---

© M L Williams

M L Williams is the author of Game (What Books Press), the chapbook Other Medicines, and coeditor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets. His poetry and prose has appeared in Salt, Western Humanities Review, Hubbub, Plume, Miramar, The Journal of Florida Studies, The Cortland Review, Rattapallax, Quarterly West and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Valdosta State University in Georgia.