The Feral Poet & John Ashberry

In their infinite wisdom, the editorial board of The Skinny Island Post has elected to give the Sunday page to island resident The Feral Poet, at least for the short term, to do with as he sees fit. This is the only known photograph of The Feral Poet, the one on the left, pictured with the eminent poet John Ashberry, in the south of France in 1989. They had both just consumed a bottle of wine each, and The Feral Poet, wearing a bolo tie he picked up in a western shop in Paris, is doing his best to make sense of the world with the one good eye he has left. The far more experienced Ashberry is, as always, unflappable.

* * *

Golden Plover
Walk with me. The tide is out
and the sun low in the west
and dipping into that bank of clouds
there. Maybe we’ll have rain yet tonight.

to take the edge off the heat
and play Latin rhythms on the bedroom awnings.
There are plover and pelicans  and osprey out;
we’ll walk against the wind at first

and have it at our backs coming home.
It isn’t complicated. Little marvels
silently shared absorb us on the way,
you don’t have to say anything.

I think those are golden plover;
see how the light seems to come up from the sand
to ignite his breast. I want to live forever
but we’ll turn around where we always do.

* * *

Last Days
There isn’t much else to say.
We find a moment to listen
and it’s nothing like we remember;
birds plentiful as rain
when we were kids
flutter on the edge of extinction
and the few that do return
in spring to trees behind the house
sound somehow different now,
less convincing; maybe

I’m making this up. I saw
a pair of Cardinals this morning;
heard their song this afternoon.
A few doves skitter in and out of sight;
a single Mockingbird resumes
from a different quarter each time,
defining in a much too poignant way
the boundaries of this tiny,
ancient hammock by the sea.

* * *

When Radio Died
There are mysteries in the rain tonight
playing out across the island;

old synopses of fearful dusks
along the coast, sunsets in glass jars,

fireflies in the cemetery. My recollections
weave down a shell road in moonlight

to the music of my father’s cigar cough.
A fine Chevrolet rusts beside a phosphate pit,

its ebonite steering wheel big as the forgery
of love we committed in the name of family.

What is it with rain that wants to keep so much hidden?
We went our separate ways when radio died.