DARRELL LINDSEY - POEMS

Darrell Lindsey is a Pushcart Prize and Rhysling Award-nominated poet from Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas. 
His poems have appeared in more than 70 journals, magazines, and anthologies. His Poets and Writers Directory listing can
be found here:   https://www.pw.org/content/darrell_lindsey

Forrest
​

Feet propped up on a Friday, 
she  studies a picture with jagged edges
plucked from the pile of photos
on her oak desk,
sketches the shadows
of Forrest’s face with charcoal. 

As she moves toward the high-rise window,
she says she imagines him
with a bedroll at dusk
riding a bicycle
toward summer woods
in the Deep South,

or perhaps talking
about the Holy Spirit
in a parking lot in Manhattan
before someone calls the cops,
or at least threatens to.

Taking a sip of Jim Beam,
she says he might be in Taos
reciting Ginsberg to a blind woman,
and just hasn’t had the chance
to mail that long-promised letter.

​

  Old Mule
​

Time is an old mule
         going back to the barn
and you, the barefoot child in the photo
         who once rode it into town.

Stopping at a seed store
           for sticks of licorice,
you returned with a tongue
           not unlike your grandfather’s,

the one on your mother’s side
           who planted flowers
beside a meandering river
            and later doused them with gasoline.

Though you never knew him,
           never fought the locusts
for some kind of living,
           or dying,

the images of all you did
           with his grin
pile up like fireflies
           in this country graveyard. 


​

​  Storm Painter

Her colors collide like thunderclouds,
bleed to the river
where flowers are fire,
where three young swimmers laugh
at flashes in the distance.

Though she has stolen her voice
from the blue wind in the willows
in order to warn them,
gathered some lost strength
from an old dream
so she can wave them back to shore,
you would not surmise it
by looking at their faces
now trembling with a hint of wisdom.

After they climb the hill
and finally look over her shoulder,
they see the self-portrait
of another storm still raging,
eyes fixed like a lightning rod. 

​