~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Keith W. Gorman

Harvey, The Lawnmower Man

He’s crossing over the curbside now, leaving

the pavement and walking this way, stopping to inspect

an old tree stump: the felled twin of a dying

pair of pines. He’s geared to the gills with homemade

chaps fastened above the knees, the silver tape

shiny and new, and his tetchy weed eater flashing

signals full of sunlight. Outside, a collar-wilting cloudburst

of red August heat is beginning to get hotter. It’s been

four fiery weeks without rainfall. These Scots pines are

nothin’ but trouble; all of ‘em die from the tops down. If

the blight don't kill 'em, the beetles will. He circles

the sallow drip line, kicking a shoe against the craggy

stump; spits hard at the yellow crabgrass. When the roots

die down, it'll all turn brown. He glares at the spindly

branches, waiting, watching—the gasoline saw still resting

on the truck bed. We'll cut 'er come November.

Roadkill

Across a twenty-three-mile swath of I-40 South,

the headlights move on a silent conveyor, flashlights

flooding the Harmon Den Road: Rattlesnake Branch

in the Pigeon River Gorge of North Carolina—–exit

seven by the underpass—–by a shelter of spruce

and loose-lined oak, and by the dewy veil of early

dawn, a tight scurry of squirrels is digging small-scale

potholes, placing sunkissed acorns in the cold, red dirt.

No man is here. Neither Peregrine Falcon nor any foe

is perched on any branch of any tree. Only headlights

move on the silent conveyor, as a four-by-four Sierra

takes the offramp road, tracing the pale chevron stripe

through a Nordic fog of half-light, to where a Spartan

squirrel makes a six-yard dash. And he’s moving fast:

first the flinch, then hot hesitation, the fatal turn—–

the quick-flicking tail. The bleary-eyed driver nigh

to the wheel. No reprieve. Now the warships pass:

bus, van, Buick, until nothing remains but a blood-red

knob of knurled flesh. One slight-sized creature

is gutted, gone, vanished forever. But an acorn

survived. The great oak thrived for five hundred years.

In Rooms of the Past

The achy spine was a boy’s price to pay for

a good night’s dreams on grandma’s bed, waking

to the sounds of the train whistle, the early

sunlight peeking around the old yellowed

shades. Late Fall and the acorn wind searching

around the sash gaps, the trees already

bare and the scrawny branches whipping

against the cold glass panes. All of these things

I remember now: the stench of litter and what I later

learned to be Pine-sol mixed with percolated

coffee, hairspray and cigarettes. Late night:

the old cat curled below the bookcase with hell’s-

red eyes, eager for a battle should I rattle her

world. The Glenwood stove—the jack-o'-lantern

flame—and how I loved ruffling that Siamese

cat, flipping a finger close to the nose; chasing her

below the bed skirt and pricking her whiskers

with a hickory stick. The same stick grandma used

on me. All of these things I remember now:

the uncle, crushing a cockroach with the flat heel

of his shoe and the cigarette sliding down against

his lower lip as the giant bug popped, leaving

a prune-like smear on the old plank floor. My

Grandma cleaning in a sleeveless smock, killing

a wasp with a wadded Kleenex, the coal-black

soot embedded below her nails. And Mom's lessons

on Ladybug Luck, cupping her hands and counting

the small spots of happiness—one for each year—

speaking soft and slow as the morning. All of these

things I remember now: placing a nickel on the rail

tracks, my father taking my hand and the great train

thundering past, honking its horn, the big wheels

leaving a childhood disk of thin-nickeled moon.

Keith W. Gorman is a poet, guitarist, and factory worker living near the foothills of The Great Smokey Mountain National Park in Eastern Tennessee. He is a scholarship recipient and graduate of The Sherwood Conservatory of Music in Chicago, Illinois. His poetry has appeared in The California Quarterly, The Rye Whiskey Review, and Eunoia Review. Email: kthgorman@gmail.com