Poetry: Selections from Taylor Hagood
Bitcoin Poem
Its graphic incarnation
glamours it into a gold piece
B-emblazoned.
But of course it is really
just more offs and ons
roaring into quiet Arkansas nights.
New mines in those mountains—
the slopes bowed beneath
riches’ pressure all anew.
The New York Times writers
revel in such stories of Ozark
and Appalachian exploitation.
Its hope lives unhinged
the perfect currency of its time,
when fiat has exposed itself
of having been for all time.
Text to My Cousin
I remember a time
when it would have been
unimaginable
for Ole Miss to be whupping
Penn State this way.
Ibises
They never
never stop fascinating me.
Their hunched shoulders
as they stalk so alone
though in flocks.
The gracefulness of their
curving orange bills.
No wonder they captured
the Egyptians’ fancy so.
Maybe some predestination
of Thoth eons ago
brought writing and magic
to me through the ibis’s head.
Maybe it will be the picture
of my ultimate mummification.
Watching them through
purple-shadow-stretched
Florida mornings
I imagine myself
lightly feathered as they.
Port Royal
for Loretta and Naomi
“Man has put his history to sleep
in the engine of doom. It flies
over his dreams in the night,
a blazing cocoon.”
—Wendell Berry
Child memory is dream memory is a covered bridge.
Shadows inside broken by sunlight cracks in boards.
Red River ripples below, quiet since it smashed that bridge out of existence in 1998.
Tennessee is Kentucky is Texas is Jamaica.
Green hedge maze at the foot of the bridge in summer, grass mowed and grass-
smelling, American Ladies winking in drunk charges. “The disease of the modern
character is specialization.” Timber on Jerusalem Ridge, yes, but also coal veins
and tobacco and bouquets and corn rows and fiddling and mandolining and Uncle Pen.
Butcher Holler is Hurricane Mills is Ashland is Leiper’s Fork.
You knew what Kenneth Koch shew: “Two and two is rather blue.”
I heard him say it in deep Appalachia Athens, Ohio, in spring. You pulled that trigger
in spring. Did you think it would bring life instead of death? What was your illogic?
Whatever it is, know I love you.
Vega is Gibson is Epiphone is Fender. Ford is International Harvester is John Deere is Mahindra.
I have felt it cold enough to kill hogs. I have witnessed dried-blood loops
on barnwood walls flung from dehorning cows. I have loved blue Kentucky girls.
I have wandered the maze entirely uninterested in finding my way out.
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