Raymond Farr


A Birth (Of What?) among Heirlooms

A strange goin’s on
forced Deputy Sodbuster’s gun hand

Kidders got ashen
ushered in like magistrates
or horse thieves

Murderers got tooled

Split ghostly at twin heads
of a paradigm

But who killed?

Who fictionalized
outlaws aghast ‘till dawn?

A twang’d moon drags
the lake

Who grooves
& sows them
conveniently

As a groom sows his lover
with himself?

New words turned out all kinds
of bad for us

The legends—

cut into quarters—

survived conflagration accidentally

A birth (Of what?)
among heirlooms



Of Our Hopelessly Marginal Breathed Upon Ghost Train

Euthanized
by strange irony

events were a tale
a drunk caboose—

The wine train huffed
wheezed

disappeared from Wolverine Gorge

A mangled steam-corpse
of rail cars

pursued itself invisibly

Not a soul aboard ‘ceptin for writin’

Then
the words were out

Abandoned in the 'tweens
of creeds & mutterings

Children genuflected
the golden ears
of a poet

Only smoke on the pond
by the trackside

as they rose



Please, Go Now. I Drained Swamps.

Iron clad
as nightmares
upon our half-broken horses

a trampled breech
prayed to us a road.

A further-west-rabbit
we called it.

It was hope in the rabbit
(our little pet, Tempest Fugate)
that put us there.

Some there
was the issue it became

A rabbit-symbol
hoping on fleeing
west.

The right words
were burial words--

Sermons examined over flapping
laundry noise
out back of cabins

To say nothing
of the solid shovels.

I have money now.
I have money now.

I warn you

I have cattle

And such as memories
of the brothers
Ephraim
&
Zebulon.

It’s why
trouble stays out

Indulging swells

of murderous rivers
crossed.

Now the crosses come harvest.

Death-flakes
snow down like tumors
of incarnadine
metaphors

imagined
by children.

This,
meanwhile,
is careful of the lost diggers

blowing
on their hands.


Vicar with a Past Played like a Poker Hand

Face to face
bone on bone
hand in hand

we jump in from here.

A handy blade
the vicar wrongly recalls it.

He wagons along
lawless

down Egypt Road.

His gumption fueled by gumption
hollowed out of trail-slicks

he can't forget
four aces—

arrayed sequentially—

become someone he once became
latching
the crookedly framed wooden gate
of the past.

He watches children
picking up tungsten.

"Into bitter broth of evil you leap,"

he sings.

"Your mothers’ cauldrons foul
intemperate wounds.”

For digging is attitude.

At which he recalls some spell or other
that goes

if’n in sickness ‘n if’n in health
till death do us part


Raymond Farr’s work was selected for inclusion in Sidebrow 01 Anthology. He has also published: two free ebooks: Two Texts, and chainge (now available at White Sky Ebooks ) as well as print editions of Purple Mountain Believers (Blue & Yellow Dog Press 2011), and There Is Something Missing in the Whole Transaction between Us (Blue & Yellow Dog Press 2011). Ecstatic/.of facts is available from Otoliths Books. His chap book, Two Hats Appear When Applauded, is available free at www.dusie.org. His most recent publication, Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky, is also available at Blue & Yellow Dog Press. Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog.
 
 
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