Poetry by
Tim Poland
| When Lazarus Comes Forth, as
Instructed she slumps on her low stool in the garden, drops her chapped hands in her lap, and stares at the stone rolled from the cave mouth, stares at the shrouded corpse waddling into the light unnoticed by the distracted crowd, exhausted, she mutters under her thin breath, oh, now why did he have to go and do that? each night, while her sister slept, she sat by his pallet in the stingy light of sputtering oil, swabbing his fevered forehead with cool water, salving his sores with ointment she mixed herself, propping up his lolling head in her hand and dribbling a bit of broth through his cracked lips, struggling to remain awake, vigilant under the weight of her own leaden fatigue now, the house has been cleaned, the walls scrubbed, the floor swept, the windows thrown open to the welcome air, the sick-room odor dissipating at last the gathered crowd beneath the one olive tree, by the well in the garden, they came for her, a small conclave of neighbors, bringing bread or dates, a smoked fish, a little wine, come to join her and her dreamy-eyed sister, to absorb the weight of private loss into the communal vault, to silently permit her relief, the unvoiced portion of grief, her due after duty faithfully performed but the crowd of neighbors is lost to her now, dazzled by the display, teased by the miraculous, some shudder with gap-jawed astonishment, some drop to their knees, lift their hands aloft, some run from the terror of the breached sepulcher as the corpse stumbles closer and closer, no one notices her she had warned him, it was obvious, she thought, despite her sister’s giddy delight, that four days in its cave, behind its stone, would leave no more than a putrid carcass to stagger forth, her brother would stink and stink he does, the rank wind carries the scent of rot up the hillside to her stool in the garden oh, let him be, she had pleaded let him lie, as intended she rubs her raw hands on her thighs, moans, and turns her gaze from the quivering crowd to her clean, open house, denied the solace of living memory, forced to linger with the animated dead |
| Guy Walks into a Bar and there’s not a rabbi with him and he wouldn’t be caught dead with a priest, not given recent revelations, and there’s not a duck on his head, though he’s fond of duck, roasted with a nice raspberry glaze guy walks into a bar, alone, and the bartender is an incurious fellow and asks the guy only what he wants to drink and walks away after setting a cold glass of beer in front of him guy walks into a bar, expecting to play a role in a joke, something funny, unpredictable, and he waits for a punch line while he picks at the peeling lacquer on the bar top, clawing toward the buried heart of raw wood, until another guy walks into the same bar, an old guy, and the old guy sits down next to the guy and says damn, but I’d like to have just one more roll with a hard-tittied woman before I die and after the guy stops weeping about the grinning hammers of time he thinks this is one of the funniest things he’s ever heard |
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Copyright 2006 Tim Poland
All Rights Reserved
| I live and work in the New River
Valley near the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwestern Virginia and teach American literature and creative writing at Radford University. I’m the author of Escapee (America House, 2001), a collection of short fiction. My work has also been published or is forthcoming in various literary magazines, such as The Beloit Fiction Journal, Timber Creek Review, Literal Latté, The Georgetown Review, Acorn Whistle, The Edge City Review, Main Street Rag, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, One Trick Pony and Appalachian Heritage. My piece in Appalachian Heritage received the 2002 Denny C. Plattner/Appalachian Heritage Award for creative non-fiction. Tim Poland's poetry can also be found in Autumn Skyline E-Magazine |