Eulogy for the Radishes
I rang the Funeral Home minutes ago,
guilty, ripe with grief over the bodies
face down in the grass next to our house.
That large one, Farris Leever,was our neighbor;
I'll never forget his lachrymose eyes,
the four cold little spheres beside him.
They're radishes, each purplish-blue mass
ravaged by my wife's dog Carmen as she tore
through Farris'garden yesterday.
He grunted and howled when he found the
carcasses of his beloved vegetables in the dirt;
his look into our window was a verdict:
You are all guilty. You frolicked as my wife
lost to stomach cancer, my children fed to a war.
Watched as I ballooned to a walrus weight.
He was right, after all. What could I, my wife,
or the dog say? That afternoon, gathered around
a blue fireplace, we heard a soft,gurgling tuba.
I walked to the window around eight to glance;
Farris was gently pouting his horn over the lost
growths. Some surreal memorial. He was shivering.
Carmen unearthed him this morning, her barks woke
us up. Brass valves curled around his fat face.
Dirt powdered his robust clothes. He had dug in.
After I dialed the phone number and my wife went
back to sleep, I stepped over to the garden. I
looked at them, their keeper, thinking: fat and dead,
fat but dead.
Work Detail
Damn near a hundred degrees when I
glimpse them lined up, working like
instruments. Orange suits and bags
moving in unison against the trash
mottling the highway.
I wonder, heat waves making this image
more surreal, what kind of criminals
do they work on these roads? Surely
not rapists, child molesters, murderers...
Lane shuts down to single-car traffic.
I can make out that one of the cons has fashioned
a laughable stop sign out of a cardboard sheet. He
gets cars to stop. Where's the supervisor?
The road moves, I get closer. Maybe four cars
away, I see what this con with the sign is all about.
Engines idle, drivers roll down windows warily,
this con clocks, punches whoever is driving.
He yells, "that's for prison."
I rub the stubble of my beard, turn my hefty
body to gape into the rear view. No where to go.
I adjust my seat belt, roll down the window
into endless heat, get ready to get what's
coming to me like everybody else.
© Ehren Bivins 2000
I am a twenty-five year old painter, songwriter and writer from Franklin,
Tennessee. Later on this summer, I have a CD entitled SONGS OF THE INNER
STATION coming out on Penetrator Records. My poems have appeared in Gnome:An
Online Journal of Underground Writing, and a short story has been published
in The 13thWarrior Review.
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