Sample Poems by Michael Graber

Furry Lewis Ponders Life and Death as a Blues Man

Crying low the cart wheels
need grease, left alone they play
the devil’s chime falsetto to the tick,
tick, tick of the rusted hinge
where my natural leg still aches
every morning on my trash route,
even though a minstrel-bound train
ate it years back.

I limped to fame late—
though most days now
I shine my spirit like Sunday’s shoes.
The Last Real Medicine Show calls …
the only place for a man
foolish enough to gamble on song.
Ever since I was a furball
the cathouses spit out
I’ve known.

Bix was already three-fourths there,
lips purple and eyes spent.
He’d jammed so pure all night
after his Whiteman gig.
He read my fortune in his eggs.
After four bars of silence
and a thick swig of coffee
said he’d seen a leg about my size
sidetrack death’s black train.

 A Primer on Quilting an Adulterous Scene

Weave the high tones of conversation
into a quilt, still threadbare
where the wind has taken your loose hair.
The silence is too much not to mention.
Just sew what is hard to say—
the tilted faces of wild children, our
frozen spouses, lonely as dying stars
whose lights barely flicker after day.

Go inseam with a faith you’ve lost since youth
like a girl who runs through glass to follow a bird
and stops, noticing blood stains on the floor.
Unstitch the untrue—the hearts, the kissing booth—
and gather images you’ve naturally earned:
Spilt wine on denim, a motel door.
 

Jimmie Howl Auditions Harmony Singers

            I.

Raised where land was cleared with vocal commands,
trees fall when my mouth opens—elements
scatter, mules sneer. The roots exposed
in song disrupt an easy hike with the demands
of place. Before the ravine bumps the summit,
I lose my voice in certain octaves: Go
mute or squeak where Momma traced the source
of red that stained the laundry back to Father.
His morning creekside prayer crumbled. The force
of an axe from behind knocked his face in water.
They left his pockets inside out. His brains
swayed in the current like a clump of creamed
chittlins frying in milky lard. The pain
strips the sound from the key of Momma’s scream.
I can’t make those notes. Otherwise,
my range can tame the land like railroad ties.

             II.

You better quit that lily jubilee
style of nutless singing if you want
to work for me. How can you smile
through a murder ballad? Humility
and pretty teeth are different moral stunts:
One grits in joy, the other guile.
Two voices imply a third note,
a rich chord if done right. Your thin
mountain tenor, if torqued, could float
around my lead like wasps around a hen
that pecked and pecked their nest to pieces. Put
your spine, that humming center, into the slur.
Rise octaves above my delta abyss,
then plunge a blue note right in the gut.
Ever rub a cat in heat? The purr
I seek in you would sneak and kill for bliss.

Directions to Your First Sponge Bath
       
For David Michael Graber, II

Press into the power of a thousand candles,
a place of substance and clear milk
where fresh water comes first from cloth.
Yes, press your fragile backbone
against night. Cell by cell the flood
carries your supple frame from water
to breast—a journey sparked by lightning
humans conjure. What can you do?
What can you do but blend
your wispy note to a tune written
on a crooked porch? In this secular
form of sacred music, Cupid salts
your first sea with a drowned lark.
Morning dew and a fat cow’s moo—
Let this wave spit you ashore.