Beyond the Crepe Myrtles, Blue Yodel

R. T. Smith

The snake in his new outfit coiled and shivered.
The mockingbird from high in the live oak mocked.
Mama on the porch rocker cleaned her two barrel
and sang how looping a skin over the rail top
might make a stubborn sky shake down a spurt of rain.
No bonbons or violins, but a busy evening
just the same: cornbread, birdsong, sweet-potato pie,
and the greedy star-glint of a diamondback’s eye.
Roses on the hedge shook like the passing of a ghost.
I scribbled every moment in my Blue Horse book,
a stay-at-home girl dead-set no life’s lesson be lost.
Old Shot ran his knife blade along the guitar neck
till the sweaty steel of six strings quaked and whined.
No prophet happened by to spit out a wisecrack.
Lightning in the key of C, a weapon on the frets
A yodel quavered in my tongue. Pearls before swine.
Under the bird perch the serpent commenced to climb.
Between the thumb and trigger finger, the silk of time.

R. T. Smith teaches writing at Washington and Lee University. His most recent collection of poems, Outlaw Style, received the Library of Virginia Poetry Book of the Year Prize. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and on Poetry Daily. His new book of stories, The Calaboose Epistles, is forthcoming from Iris Press.

“Beyond the Crepe Myrtles, Blue Yodel” appears in our Autumn 2009 issue.