Two poems by Shelby Stephenson

The Man Not Right
              to the memory of Azel G. Manning, 1878-1952
 
 For several decades
 The sun seemed dark for sorrow, his monument
 By the side of the road reminder
 That he tied his horse to one parking meter
 Downtown (I saw this) to preach and sway passersby
 To follow the Man who scarred his hands
 For their life-stories,
 As they might forgive themselves
 To hear his – Azel’s – tales of woe untutored
 In his art as fourth-marriage vows,
 While the new-made bride
 Waited for short spaces to breathe
 Her story free of tedium
 Of his purge,
 His wild looks binging
 Deep in the churchyard’s quaking
 Graves: he called himself the “High Knocker of the Lord,”
 While his beard trembled before and after times
 He unhooked the bridle from his horse
 That clopped for Muses that sang for nearby privies.
 Dogs liked him.
 And why not.
 His little Bible in his hand he also traveled in trains,
 As listeners tuned their ears to his spells
 Grounded in throes for those whose lives
 Missed his mystical proportions; he swore by circumstance
 Never to lose his soul to houses of gold.
 He made his living selling produce.
 
 

My Sweetheart
 
 My sweetheart writes from Mule City,
 A non-rodeo town, a pity,
 She says, underneath all the straight
 Shoving she does under her skirt
 Of off-white and the clownish
 Socks she likes to wear and wish
 I would own up to some lunacy
 Which lodges memory
 This side of life, while the religious
 Folks strut with their bodies
 Safe from God’s hindering blush,
 All that strengthening rush
 Of blood without those Depends
 Her mother wears like a thin
 Veil between what mortal gulf
 Lays down its bridge in gasps
 When the preacher asks if we
 Believe in heaven and hell
 And I do not arm myself
 To say along the way that shelves
 Fill up with views on prayer.
 Listen: this speedy age needs a sprayer
 To do tricks real as the adult lovers
 We are, plus free-footed fretters
 Proclaiming Eve is palindromic
 Substringing this world’s a bone
 Since so much porn makes the news all day,
 The story of Stormy and DT who says
 There is no one hardrock position
 That might leave old people in a situation
 They cannot avoid without prayers
 Unrestrained from life’s soothsayers
 Mumbling about how life’s too long
 Anyway to keep dogs off leash in the wrong
 Field, especially when the play
 Down becomes exactly what we are trying to say.
 
 

Shelby Stephenson was Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 2015-2018.  His recent book of poems:  Slavery and Freedom on Paul's Hill (Press 53, 2019).