R.T. Castleberry

The Traveler at a Loss

Pulled to the streets,
like the night dog on its course beyond
the refinery fences and Four Corners,
I watch the casualty list grow
poets drunk in the crosswalk,
singers dying on the causeway.
Their stories,
refrains of weakness, of weariness,
are mine.
Their vocabulary, remorseless as rain,
is mine.

Stale until dawn,
I watch an emigrant moon traverse
a lane of live oaks and lantana,
August lilies blooming within the fog.
I travel with fist clenched,
a fine sharp knife, honed and wicked,
heavy in my back pocket.
In my writing bag
is a tattered map of southern France,
a mask of Stephen Crane, a mask of Townes Van
    Zandt.
Wrapped in a camouflage shirt
the key to last year’s hotel,
the ticket to last month’s train
bookmark a Douay Bible.

A morning sun slices lieaf-flooded lanes,
curves choked with sites
of church grounds, schoolyard, first house.
Unresolved, still restless
I watch high-striking jets dissect the compass rose.
I burn phone minutes with long distance directions,
gauging Santa Fe,  Canberra, Berlin as destinations.
I’ve lost the sense of this ragged touring.
I drain each day like a river through the delta
and sleep in four hour blocks,
dreaming beneath a hobo moon.

An Arrangement of Necessities

I write at home
and the war is somewhere else.

I make a dry martini.
I take a drier tone and ready for the day.
As I deconstruct the fable of the Chinese mare
it becomes a metaphor of melancholy~
a merging of damaged wire and mathematics;
it becomes the needful, sighing guide
inside the minutes of every myth.

I draw no line between my needs
and someone else’s goods.
The dimes I steal are pooled
as red coins of dispensation.
“Give me the $20 suffering,”
I say at Sunday criticism.
Irony is my favorite emotion.
It is my center as my voice.
I worship at a tree of crows.
I marvel at the stammering
as I view the words of God.

Tomorrow I travel,
see my headlights on the car ahead,
lay my pallet in the dust ruts beside the road.
All is in order here:
the secrets I acknowledge, the children that I don’t
are discarded in the highway weeds.
In a month, a miser’s mood
vacant as a stone thrown to make a river wall,
I watch a line of fires building from the Eastern
    horizon.
I leave to show I can.

Nothing Was Plain (in the 
Water’s Light)

As I make my slow way home,
cooled by the sentinel breezes
of creek and cedar canyon,
sunlight is a study
of hammered gold on terraced hills.
The Palo Duro moves over the oak roots,
over shale and yellowed sandstone.
Upstream, beyond the bend
chinaberry trees diffuse morning’s haze,
morning’s battle smoke.
Sword broken in its scabbard,
empty pistol heavy in its holster,
I water my horse,
soak bruised hands in the chilling flow.
As we ended the Kiowa track
I cracked my saber on a collarbone,
a defender’s arm.
I’ve  lived a life of two books~
Morphy on cheese and Caesar’s commentaries:
all-out war, taken up from the page.
Downstream,
regimental colors fly above the field commander’s
    tent,
West Point rings lie on a table,
gathered like agates in a marbles bag.
The best of their kind are dead, our general says.
We killed them all.

____

R.T. Castleberry is a widely published poet living in  Houston, Texas.