~ Delta Poetry Review ~

- Featured Poet -

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the 2008 Texas State Poet Laureate, has published twenty-three print collections of poetry and numerous poetry chapbooks, both online and in print. Among the many honors and awards he has received for his poetry are two Texas Review Poetry Prizes (2001 and 2004); two Western Heritage Wrangler Awards (National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum); the Violet Crown Book Award (Writers’ League of Texas); and multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net awards. Additionally, Thomas received a nomination for the 2007 Poets’ Prize (Nicholas Roerich Museum) and seven finalist citations for the Spur Award (Western Writers of America). Although Thomas presently resides in the Chihuahuan Desert of southwestern New Mexico, he lived in Houston from 1967 until 2011, when he and his wife moved to Alpine in Far West Texas. Larry's web site address is www.larrydthomas.com

Window
(Eudora Welty gazing through a window)

She doesn’t know
why cells divide.
She contemplates
the gender of God,

whether religion
is a matter of mind,
gut, or both.
Is her window flat,

concave, convex,
or all of the above?
Is it glass or molten sand,
cooled and cut to dull

the sting of weather?
Or a monocle
through which she gazes
upon the world,

drawn by wonder
to the chartreuse frenzy
of a granddaddy oak
so rapt in its single act

of reaching
it shimmers
like the jingles
of a frameless tambourine?

Night Waders
(Biloxi, Mississippi)

With nothing but their waders
to save them, they trudge through sea
black as oil, seeking the strikes
of sharks and bull reds.
Their generators
groan on the beach
like injured beasts,

casting light across the waves
where mullet leap
silver as coins
flipped by the thumbs of thieves.
They lumber in the surf
like spastic Frankensteins
bleeding currents

of foam, their macho-
camouflaged terror
betrayed by the glow
of a harvest moon
striking tiny fires
in the white of their wide,
protuberant eyes.

To the Bone

Take a morning in late November,
scraped raw by the blade of a blue norther.
Soften it with an old Baptist church

in whose stained glass angels float
framing the words of the “Twenty-Third Psalm,”
drawing a funeral service to a flawless close.

Dignify it with a grieving widow attired in black,
relieved at last by her masterful execution
of her husband’s last will and testament,

down to the finest details of his service.
Heighten its drama with her twinge of guilt as,
seated in a black limousine, she catches herself

luxuriating in the solitude of her heirship.
Then add the finishing touch of a crow
whose incessant cawing she hears in the distance,

a solitary, anonymous crow stuck in the throat
of a heretofore perfect morning like a tiny
fish bone just beyond the finger’s reach.

Pit Bull
(Pumpkin Bend Township, Arkansas)

I should have sensed his violence
by the size and length of the leash,
looped snug around his master’s hand

as the rope of a bull rider.
When I approached, he was sitting
close beside his master who was resting

from her jog. I was so taken
with the dog’s power I naively
flattened my hand and lowered it

palm down to pet his muscular
head from, of all places, above.
I knew something was deadly wrong

when his master toppled backward,
jerking the dog’s leash as if to break
his neck, screaming, “You idiot!”

You’re lucky you still have a hand!
Don’t ever pet a dog like that,
from above!” Her magnificent

brindle stud just glared, finishing off
the drama with his slobbering tongue
and blood-shot Armageddons of his eyes.