by: Harold Whit Williams
Waiting for the FIre to go Out [0:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download self-portrait of the would-be cartographer [1:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
WAITING FOR THE FIRE TO GO OUT
Each day we give our words to wind.
Watch them disperse among the wood smoke.
Words like yes, no, maybe, ornithology,
And the Spanish word for owl, which is búho.
The owl I saw as a child is long dead
But that doesn’t stop me scanning treetops at dusk.
Tonight, our dying star sun lingers in the live oak
And grandfather’s rifle is a twelve-hour drive from here.
SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE WOULD-BE CARTOGRAPHER
Far from these coordinates
Where we sleep and eat, northeastward
Thru cotton field and pine thicket
To some forgotten corner of Alabama,
Where latitude and longitude lines
Fluctuate in shimmering summer heat-
I am a towheaded child
Pulling a red wagon rattling with fossils,
Or napping in tissue paper snowdrifts
Under a fake Christmas tree,
Or drawling a book report on Charlotte’s Web
To a classroom cramped with
Future drug addicts, military drones,
Thirty-year-old grandmothers. Or,
Not so far away, due south
Over Rio Grande scrub, grapefruit farms,
Almost to the edge of tropics
I am planted, a withered shrub of a man
Filling up my garage apartment
With empty tequila bottles,
Begging street corner migrant workers
For spare change and scraps of food,
Swearing to swaying palms that one day
I will sit down with pen and ink
And map out my very own flat earth.
Harold Whit Williams is a native Alabamian living in Austin, TX, working in library cataloging at UT. He played guitar for a decade in the critically-acclaimed power pop band Cotton Mather, but these days, he mostly writes poems and does studio work. Whit Williams’ home recording project is called KIBOSH.
His poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Concho River Review, Zero Ducats, Bedouin Books Swap/Concessions, and is forthcoming in Oxford American and The Oklahoma Review.