Scott Jackson-Ricketts suggests I call the poem Waynesboro Exit, so that is what I will call this incarnation for now. I plan to post a couple more poems in a few days.
WAYNESBORO EXIT
The interstate freezes on Afton Mountain.
A few vultures perch on some broken pines.
I can see thin ice crusted on their feathers.
Traffic is sliding past the Waynesboro exit.
I'm parked in my rusty blue truck watching
clouds steal against the steep embankment
of Rockfish. Migration has fizzled into stones.
Not one hawk glides anywhere, a white pigeon
flaps from a bridge, and claps its feral wings
above the morning's grunting load of timber
scabbing around a curve.
I blame the bright noon hour of my windshield.
I think the sun has cracked open all the clouds
and I'm November talking to myself, talking
an empty sky into seven crows and a stray duck
shouldered from nowhere. I might just haul dirt
to my dead garden, might guzzle some cold rum
and laugh at you counting thirty thousand hawks
soaring today past Veracruz.
Copyright 2009, Clyde Kessler