Four Poems by Dallas Lee

                                        

Books of Paper and Ink?


All dead or dying. Dostoevsky?
Buck or best offer in yard sales.
Ditto Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens,
Blake, et al. All their pages in Earth’s
65,900 languages wouldn’t fill a thimble
on the World Wide Web. Cervantes?
Same, maybe sadder – he’s funny!
Melville? Google whales. O’Connor?
Go online, read the Bible for yourself.
Yeats, Bishop, Lowell, Milosz, Kunitz,
Oliver, Lux? Mere poets, their words
damned to landfills where worms
consume it all, blind to the light.





Dear Elvis in Heaven


When you wrote, what inspired you –
a nudge in heart or loins?
A yearning for your own Beguine?
Some lithesome skirt of piety


in your dreams? I ask because
I just read a vow that does not
reveal to whom it is addressed –
… to go on loving her until
in the end she loves me too.


Wow. Sounds like you – but no.
Vincent Van Gogh wrote
those lines about a woman whose
never, no, never haunted him


evermore, perhaps even now
in Paradise. If you see him, ask.
He might recite lines that followed –
The more she disappears
the more she appears.


How I wish I had written that!
Perhaps you can say now,
Elvis – is absence of envy
a blessing of Heaven’s?




Milky Way Band


As a boy, I daydreamed
I led a band called Milky Way.
Me at the keyboard, Snickers
on drums, Mars Bar on fiddle,
vocalist a female called Mounds
of course, and shame on me!
But excuse me, too. Coconut
smothered in chocolate was
a mouth-watering first love,
back when I was just a little
finger-licker trying to imagine
how it would be to be a man.




Vulture Religion


Is it not a careless Bible
translation to declare
vultures unclean and damn
them to the kingdom
of death for feeding on corpses?
What about rove beetles,
possum, hyenas, earthworms –
any of Earth’s bone-gnawing
creatures? What about me,
raised on shot-dead meat
of male deer and hogs,
all those doves killed rising?

Dallas Lee - is a retired journalist, is author of The Cotton Patch Evidence (Harper & Row), which documents events leading to the founding of Habitat for Humanity, and a self-published book of poetry, No Kind of Blues (Archway). He is a Texas native, a graduate of Baylor University, and lives in Charlotte NC with his wife, Mary Carol.