I'll Try to Tell You What I Know

Sometimes it's so hot the thistle bends

to the morning dew and the limbs of trees

seem so weighted they won't hold up moss

anymore. The women sit and swell

with the backwash of old family pain

and won't leave the house to walk across

the neighbor's yard. One man takes up a shotgun

over the shit hosed from a pen of dogs.

One boy takes a fist of rings and slams the face

of a kid throwing shells at his car.

That shiny car is all the love his father

has to give. And his mother cooks

the best shrimp étouffée and every day

smokes three packs down to their mustard-colored ends.

One night the finest woman I ever

knew pulled a cocktail waitress by the hair

out of the backseat of her husband's new

Eldorado Cadillac and knocked her

down between the cars at the Queen Bee Lounge.

She drove the man slumped and snoring with his hand

in his pants home and not a word was said.

I'll try to tell you what I know

about people who love each other

and the fear of losing that cuts a path

as wide as a tropical storm through the marsh

and gets closer each year

to falling at the foot of your door.