 |
 |
BILL ANDERSON - Longtime member of the Rusk County Poetry Society, Bill serves in many capacities: yearbook editor, Fall Festival contest coordinator and club treasurer. Bill is a councilor for the Poetry Society of Texas and his poems have won local and state awards. He lives in Longview, Texas on Lake Cherokee.
|
 |
With stylistic hints of Georg Trakl and James Wright, Bill Anderson explores with soul while recalling the momentary images that surround memories. Sometimes utilizing relatively conventional forms and meters, while at other times a looser poetic free lyric, his poetry confronts the inward man and encourages the disenfranchised, or the outsider, unto an optimistic expression of faith in life, human transcendence, and ultimately, a beautiful image of hope that we all enjoy reading and partaking of.
-Justin Micheal Robinson
|
 |
DUST
I dust the chessboard weekly,
carefully lifting the pieces, polishing each
checkered square, black and white,
like truth.
Chess, a game of my youth... No one
in my family played chess but me. Men
were plumbers, mechanics, truck drivers.
Women sold Avon, worked for the phone company,
raised kids. Even the moonshine manufacturing
great-uncle fit in better than I did.
For twenty years, the chessmen have only moved
at dusting time.
In my silent chamber, kings and queens
offer mute testimony to places I have been:
the box—ruddy teak from Indonesia,
squares of African ebony and Indian ivory,
the marble pieces carved in China,
as unused as the French I learned in school,
and as hard as life.
The gleam from my ring, bamboo etched
on gold, draws my attention, and I recall
a different me, a long-ago Arabian sandstorm,
and a lover who wore a matching band.
I've kicked up dust on other paths
since then; experienced other things,
been other people. I count them slowly,
breathing in the past. Is it seven lives I've lived
or is it eight ...or nine?
Life is transitory, written in chalk, as easily
turned to dust as yesterday's homework
on a blackboard, wiped away and forgotten,
quickly replaced by another.
I shake the dustcloth; dust motes
flutter and scatter like snowflakes,
soundlessly, unnoticed.
LAYOVER IN VENEZUELA
Through blue of pre-dawn sky,
out of the west, they fly
toward a seaside idyll.
Flamingos, flaming red,
swoop down from overhead
to search the inlet bed
for some small crustaceans.
Success or frustration,
joy or irritation
are reflected in their cries.
Then, as a group, they rise
and sail into sunrise.
Each morning they stop here
en route to who-knows-where.
Someday I’ll join them there.
TRUCK FLYING
A falcon floats on simoom winds in cerulean sky
above two pickups speeding southeast from Dhahran.
The grass-green vehicles, vibrant in the heat-
hazed air, offer a splash of color in the endless,
colorless dunes. Young Americans, bodies burned
ruddy brown, engage four-wheel drives, turn west
into the cruel beauty of the Arabian desert.
Rampant trucks race up undulating mounds of sand,
air conditioners blast to battle blistering heat,
stereos blare to belay blazing boredom
of men without women, bursting with life
in a forbidding land; they strive to launch
themselves into flight. Undaunted by failure,
they try again and again, carve rib-bruising
hieroglyphs when they fall short, then roll
to a stop near a dry, flat sabkha.
Expats dig in the brine-rich wadi for Desert Roses,
find three of the elusive gypsum crystals—delicate
melon-sized silica rosettes—celebrate their treasure
with Saudi champagne, apple juice and club soda,
in the light and shadow of sinking sun through rock
outcropping. Sweat-drenched, they join Pink Floyd
in shouting at the emptiness: Is There Anybody
Out There? climb back into their trucks,
return to another week of repression.
The falcon soars on the searing air stream as it
incessantly writes and rewrites its cuneiform
codex in the shifting sand.
All Poems Copyright (C) 2010, Bill Anderson, except if noted otherwise
|
|
