~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Larry Thomas

Chinese Tallow

Southerners call you a "trash tree," your shaded interior

crowded with dead branches stark as the antlers of bucks

cluttering the Camel-blackened walls of a honkytonk.

For ten years now you've clung to your tenuous life,

managing somehow to green out again each spring.

Three or four years ago we noticed a black cavity

forming at the base of your scabrous trunk, scraped it

with a screwdriver and found fat borers big as plugs

of white tobacco. We dug out the cavity, doused it

with poison, and plugged it with sticky filler that dried

to amber Styrofoam, leaving your wound, for the time being,

good as new. You've greened out yet again this spring

and I see sophisticatedly placed among your chartreuse leaves

a solitary scarlet one, elegant as the lone white soul 

in Van Gogh's bed of purple "Irises," your subtle augury

of the indigo autumn sky you'll fill with dazzling hues 

of oxblood, burgundy, and harvest gold. As the wind gusts,

you'll trash the yard with crisp twigs intimating death,

raining them beneath your fury of gratuitous color.

Still Life with Gulf, July and Louisiana

(oil on canvas by an anonymous artist)

The artist started with wind

wielding lashes of sand and salt shards,

knocking ghost crabs from their footholds,

scorching the fringes of palm fronds.

He added a sea having bestowed its creatures

with barbs, spines, or poison, reveling 

in its pastime of unmitigated violence.

Then he daubed a sun laying hands of fire

on the feathers of screaming gulls.

He topped off the canvas with sky

grown hopelessly rabid with blue, leaving it,

exactly as he should have, there, just flat-out there.

Of Southern heritage, Larry D. Thomas served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Buttonhook Press, in late 2024 and early 2025, published online his chapbook, Letting the Light Work (Poems of Mexico), and two poetry pamphlets, GEMS and Bestiary: Far West Texas. Each is available for reading and/or pdf downloading free of charge at the Buttonhook Press website:

https://ojalart.com/category/buttonhook-press/ A previous contributor to DPR, Thomas currently resides in New Mexico.