Thomas Lux Poems

gnawing through a shinbone, a high howl
inside of which a bloody, slashed-by-growls note
is heard, unlike that
sound, and instead, its opposite: a barely sounded
...

follows the river as it bends
along the valley floor,
going the way it must.
Where water goes, so goes the road,
...

One sweet pound of filet mignon
sizzles on the roadside. Let's say a hundred yards below
the buzzard. The buzzard
sees no cars or other buzzards
...

How, in the first place, did
they get torn-pulled down hard
too many times: to hide a blow,
or sex, or a man
...

furnished rooms, flats, a hayloft,
a tent, motels, under a table,
under an overturned rowboat, in a villa (briefly) but not,
as yet, a yurt. In these places
...

What I love about this little leaning mark
is how it divides
without divisiveness. The left
or bottom side prying that choice up or out,
...

is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head; it is *spoken*,
a voice is *saying* it
...

"There was poverty before money."
There was debtors' prison before inmates,
there was hunger prefossil,

there was pain before a nervous system
to convey it to the brain, there existed

poverty before intelligence, or accountants,
before narration; there was bankruptcy aswirl

in nowhere, it was palpable
where nothing was palpable, there was repossession

in the gasses forming so many billion ... ;
there was poverty—it had a tongue—in cooling

ash, in marl, and coming loam,
thirst in the few strands of hay slipping

between a pitchfork's wide tines,
in the reptile and the first birds,

poverty aloof and no mystery like God
its maker; there was surely want

in one steamed and sagging onion,
there was poverty in the shard of bread

sopped in the final drop of gravy
you snatched from your brother's mouth.
...

No one knew why horses were dying — two from two farms over,
one in town, three at the poor farm (not in great shape,
anyway, so no
concern at first), then the mayor's son's pony,
then three stalls in a row
at the local sulky track. The vet sent blood to the State Police,
who sent it to Boston for "further analysis."
Meanwhile, two more died.
One so old it was no surprise,
and another mistaken for a deer and shot.
Some people wanted to make a connection,
but the errant hunter was cousin to the sheriff
and was known as too dim to pull off
a string of horse poisonings.
There were no more suspicious deaths
in the county for two months. Then three, lying down
next to each other, seen first by my cousin Freddy
at dawn in the town square.
He delivered newspapers.
Horses rarely lie down flat
unless they're sick, or dead.
Test results came back
from Boston and, Freddy said, also the Feds.
Inconclusive, though each necropsy
showed that the poison
was delivered with the aid of a carrot
or a sugar cube in a carrot.
...

which regenerate their tails
and also eat only the tails of other electric eels,
presumably smaller, who, in turn, eat ...
Without consulting an ichthyologist — eels
are fish — I defer to biology's genius.
I know little of their numbers
and habitat, other than they are river dwellers.
Guess which river. I have only a note,
a note taken in reading
or fever — I can't tell, from my handwriting, which. All
I know is it seems
sensible, sustainable: no fish dies,
nobody ever gets so hungry he bites off more
than a tail; the sting, the trauma
keeps the bitten fish lean and alert.
The need to hide while regrowing a tail teaches guile.
They'll eat smaller tails for a while.
These eels, these eels themselves are odes!
...