Crisler's poems online:
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![]() Curtis Crisler Ephemeral I drove passed Pickneyville, let the colloquial explosion of naming a town slip into my drowsiness, while I kept one eye struggling for light. I was driving away from my grading of composition papers, on an interstate to St. Louis, while the fog outside infiltrated my head space. All was white. I fought at fighting, kept pushing lead eyelids up until the muscled fog swallowed me in an abrupt braking. I saw where they escaped, the small hilltop where fence was corrupted. All over the highway, the horses hung out, majestic, shinny with muscular toned skin representing heaven's third ward—encircled by clouds, car completely at full stop, on a lonely high way with horses. Me. They stop-signed my doubt, took over two lanes of road, like an orange highway crew. Dreamy, we all were in God's mind, no ground existed. They were wild, life—free, roaming a great expanse of faith. And for minutes the loud words of hooves faded from road to grass. They gave me passage, as the white around their legs made them roll by me, before I knew I was looking back at black voltage thighs, or life's true burgundy of a buttock, through my rear view; and still, no cars came from the south. The black horse fiercely shook his mane. The rest of gang eyed me going north. A whiteness shifted, as sound tried hugging my tires, tried playing with rubber on concrete. My head cleared. Awoke, I rode. Watched another phalanx of horses trot down hill in rear view. Oh, so honest. Brace —for Liviu Librescu Your hands on steel door, on entrance & exit, put your mind back to camp, site you fed breath hope in concentration of Nazi dissidence. Only to embrace how time made hope a man since Germany. You have crested this threshold before, waiting, wailing, accepting tremor & shake, with brothers & sisters in a grand atrocity. Yet here, old voices of young faces ghost through your mettle & hold you to fence this wall of suffering. You are not alone, here, there are millions holding up their weight against intrusion. You know all of these somber brackets of change, like you know adjustment, & time, & hurt. Hands like strange-toed feet walk on vertically, up towards a ceiling, walk on like a band of musicians parading in streets to paradise of tirelessness. To the right of you, hands. To the left of you, hands, pushing down structure to lunacy. A soft chorus looms. Sparkling voices resound your childhood song: fresh, exuberant, & tickling that off spring wind marking a bulge in a boy's kite. ![]() | ||