Notes on Albert

Near Brookhaven, Mississippi

August 22, 1979

Resting now from breaking up turnip patch with gray mule and busted plow

Eightyish and overalled, shoes laced with hay string.

       Don't do no good to wear boots. Rattlesnakes always strikes above 'em.

               Timber Rattlers: short, thick and mean; won't hardly ever sing out till you almost steps on 'em.

               Black Diamonds: the biggest kind; always buzz before you gets close.

Half a dozen truck patches in scattered openings beat into swamp

Dog chained in every garden to keep varmints out.

       Only way to make a crop.

       Two thangs you can't poison – deer and rabbits.

Lives in old shack with old lady, no phone, no indoor plumbing

Shared well bucket of sweet water filtered by palmetto and gallberry roots.

       Worked ten hours a day in a sawmill for $3.00 a week.

       Filled a 5 bushel oat sack slap up with $3.00 worth of groceries!

Looks around at beautiful garden and ragged pickup

Forecasts

       World's fixin to revolt back to old time ways.

       Even I have too much.

Untitled

Last night on the front porch of an abandoned sharecroppers shack

I ran the gray matter in my head through the wringer of an old washing machine

Trying to squeeze out some truth I could boil along with Chinaberries

    From the only shade tree close by the crying gate

In a cast iron wash pot resting upturned against the creosote steps

    And having only two pinholes easily plugged with match stems

In order to cook up a story about the ghosts of this place I could literally smell

    All mixed up with the aroma of cotton poison and Sharkey clay

As they lay face-up in an ordered row half under the sagging house

    Half in the side yard holding bouquets of secrets

A worn-down man with a rapture smile in a white Sunday suit

A one-armed boy no longer hungry

A gravid woman looking down the road toward a painted house

Two yellow curs barking silently in their death dreams

Even an iron shod mule that knew the sweet taste of revenge

Others too I couldn’t see very well through the smoke of my fire

Sunrise now casting rays through the rising breath plume

Of the sawmill dragon in town

The simmering story is almost done

Kelby Ouchley is a writer, public speaker, retired biologist and manager of National Wildlife Refuges. Since 1995 he has written and narrated "Bayou Diversity," an award-winning weekly conservation program on public radio. He is the author of six books and lives with his wife Amy on the edge of the D'Arbonne Swamp in Rocky Branch, Louisiana. The delta occupies a powerful place in Ouchley's psyche. The poems above were written forty years apart.