A Man is More than the Mountain He Falls From

Larry Meek left us in the
cemetery with its dead
grass and its salty dirt,
late one night, to scare us.
He was a neglected artist,
Scotty said. Shelly said
he was a drunk. He was
their dad, not mine. So poor
they lied to their crushes
about where they lived.
I don’t think he left us to
the graves from cruelty.
He wanted to shake
loose our lazy souls, to
prompt us to feel something
terrifying. Transcendent.
This was one of the glorious
things he thought to do
for us, this man who burnt
his kids’ toys in a barrel
because they didn’t clean
their rooms. He had been
punished like so many poor
boys who ran miles down
the mountain in a blizzard
and came home with a doctor
too late: his baby sister
was already dead.
When a pop-top slit
my foot in the leech-filled
ditch we learned to swim in,
Larry stitched it. And I was
never the kid who poured
salt on the leeches to watch
them melt. I peeled
them from my skin and
threw them in the bushes.
I gave them a chance
though not reprieve. This is
a praise poem I’m writing.
Larry Meek had chickens,
marvelous rhubarb with poisonous
leaves and a buzzing garden
of insects that forever
frightened me, but Larry
didn’t. The cemetery was so
damned outrageous
none of the adults ever said so,
and the tombstones shone
like the tongues of the dead.
I heard them say: this is a world
of stories that hurt,

Thank God, Hallelujah.