Walt McDonald

I never knew them all, just hummed
and thrummed my fingers with the radio,
driving five hundred miles to Austin.
...

Shiny as wax, the cracked veneer Scotch-taped
and brittle.I can't bring my father back.
Legs crossed, he sits there brash
...

When I take my dachshund jogging, boys and widows gawk
and stop tossing balls or lopping limbs off shrubs.They call
and point at long, pot-bellied Oscar trotting like a rocker horse,
tongue wagging, dragging on grass when he hops over skateboards,
...

My wife takes salt for starters, and rusted strands
of barbed wire, the iron Grandfather left.
Chips chunks from a salt block mired in sand,
that tongue-rubbed marble artwork of the West,
...

I see her thumbs-up sign
go down to take the throttle.
She turns away, chin up
and urgent, flesh I have held
...

That's why we're here,
that fish-hook coupling of claws
and bodies tumbling love-locked
down and around between mountains,
...

Downriver rocks were rapids.Believe me,
even fish have ears.Sweating, we coasted
too far out on a river we've fished
for forty years.I swear it's never
...