Syntax
Occasionally a god speaks to you,
rutted tollway a flint knife breaching
gutted fields hung on event
horizon, clear cut contradiction
through soybeans and sheared corn: blue
pickup an orange blaze, white letters
blistered, boiling down to tarmac,
asphalt, sulfur fume cured by a methane
gas burn-off pipe, blue flame chipped
with white raising a buttress of weather
-burnt bricks, flaking wind
totem. We stopped to take some cargo
on, weighted October with a freight
of waiting snow traveling east, panic of
starlings startled from stubble husks
by a harvest moon dangled directly
ahead: drove into the pitted sphere, bloody
pearl punched in a sky just out of reach
(vanishing point retreating, peeling),
one of the yellowed streetlights
by now, dimming, diminishing. The road
says to perspective, wait.
.
by Reginald Shepherd
from Otherhood: Poems by Reginald Shepherd
University of Pittsberg Press