Sample Poems by David Rigsbee
From “Sonnets to Hamlet”
1.
Dragonfly September, birdsong is boilerplate.
The stir of heat, like a clothesline’s wave
keeps horizons indistinct: you suffocate.
An indigenous butterfly leaves the grave
to flit in children’s connect-the-dots down
cemetery lanes to haloed fields.
Time that is everything lies in the unseen;
a flick of its toad’s tongue yields
only one more spire-skewered prize.
Nearby the last cougar parts the weeds
leveling real estate with the same enterprise
that measures its life-dream in overloads,
where predator’s eye and victim’s throat
hold silence in place as you would a coat.
2.
The rasp of crows spreads along the sky,
each fresh surge a makeshift marker
birds make up, through which they glide
moments later like wit through a letter
when words make their nomadic way
across a page’s sense-resistant desert.
Poor south, still and ever about to be
that page, opting for the discount version
of self first and then of place, schooled
to set things apart, to cloak coercion,
to see, before they burn, factories retooled.
I remembered Southwell’s babe. In that version,
Everyman and Christ merged in poetic last breath:
no upgrade for the Savior, but a plus for death.
3.
It was better in the fields, topping
tobacco. In sandy dirt where it took root,
where sun bore down without stopping,
scorching row on row, foot after foot.
Lines of sight exchanged belief
for a vanishing point where rank joined file.
We pulled munching worms from the leaf.
Mashed furred casings to paste, while
waves of neighbors pushed one along
as if there were the future waiting
with all our failures annealed by song
instead of copperheads crazed by mating,
instead of the years’ V in its descent
turning and leaving like the President.
4.
Robin-fledge and spider silk float down
the air. A butterfly’s a flying ace
dogging its mate. The verb outdoes the noun
both in nomination and in flying grace.
Just like that the early summer feel
turns to indigestion; a yellow-jacket
buries its sting in a ditzy nymph’s heel.
A roving eye comes to rest in its socket.
Time, not space, was the dimension of success.
You traded the hairnet for the braided tiara.
Your blood-mapped uniform, the look of distress
confused a horoscope with its fact: the horror.
Even a beer piss could stop on a dime,
and drunk partners, dancing, could rewrite time.