The Tuesday Poem

Hill Country - Lisa Bickmore

The sheets shorn back, my hips at your mouth:

yesterday we bought white peaches near the Pedernales

River, which runs

through the ranch where LBJ lived out the last years

he had the prescience to know would be brief. Acre

after acre he added

to the spread, to console a late despair. The fruit

scents our room, where we’ve told ourselves the past

is past, in this interval far from home.

A Sunday morning, this hotel room — we can afford to

take it slow, even though the sky grays with smoke

drifting north from fires burning in Mexico. Another

crisis, this time not ours. Not ours,the territory,

the ranch’s soil which,

we were told, derives its dark strength from the

river, its cycle of flood and decline, flood and

decline.

No erosion, despite the fitful havoc —just laden

trees and a profusion of blooms: evening primrose,

bluebonnet,

wrinkled poppy, black-eyed Susan, thistle, wild

cosmos, and over all of it, the birds fly, swoop and

dive.

We’ll take our cue from them, the peaches now

spilling from their flimsy sack. You’ll lift

your face to me, move up and over me nearer, your

lips and beard stained with juice, the pulp and flesh

of your tasting, eating.

* Lisa Bickmore lives in Utah. She has published one

book of poems, Haste. This poem was highly commended

in last year’s Gregory O’Donoghue International

Poetry Competition, which is open for entries.

www.munsterlit.ie for details.