Wilmer Mills

She minces squid and a marinated scallion, Mixes rice with shrimp and olive paste. . . . Hope for the English meal, though half Italian With her jet black hair and her elastic waist. Unlike the other television cooks, She brings to life a lobster that was dead With common spices, her exotic looks, And recipes she dreamed about in bed.

It may be esoteric and perverse That I consult Pythagoras to hear A music tuning in the universe. My interest in his math of star and sphere Has triggered theorems too far-fetched to solve. They don't add up. But if I rack and toil More in ether than a mortal coil, It is to comprehend how you revolve, By formulas of orbit, ellipse, and ring. Dear son and daughter, if I seem to range It is to chart the numbers spiraling Between my life and yours until the strange And seamless beauty of equations click Solutions for the heart's arithmetic.

Empty cattle trailers Rumbled dummy thunder Down the road all day, and now tonight, Heat lightning flashes more of the same fake rain. It’s just as well. I couldn’t get to sleep, And now it ricochets across the sky With empty loads of light. We’ve had a month Of drought that tightens dirt around my pond. The local wells are dry. But I’ve retired, Threw out my wand. I hate this time of year. Roux can burn if flour Sticks in skillet butter. I’ve been cooking up a storm myself, My Daddy’s filé gumbo recipe. He used to be a chef on oil rigs Until the hurricane. I heard the waves That killed him, and I hear them every year. It’s emptiness that fills me. That’s my skill. I hear the vacant rain before it falls. It’s like the murmur of a spiraled shell. Hurricane weather, stewing Deep for landfall, spewing Rain-a-plenty in the Gulf and here In Tennessee they always have a lack Of something. Two men called today for wells. I told them both to go to hell, and now They think I’m sinful, not to use my skill. They stand to lose so much, but don’t we all. I lost a lot in Hurricane Camille And even now can’t hear the end of it. More heat lightning flashes, Absent rain that passes Over clouds, and I can make it out, Each gurgling current under withered fields, Down kitchen drains. The neighbors think I’m crazy, Up all hours, but they’ll never know The screaming voice inside a breaker’s rage Or how it simmers in my ear. I hate The sound of water. Give me one good chance To make it silent. I’d be right as rain.

At Waffle House, they fired her on the spot: “You talk too much!” She’d told her customers That “made” gets “mad” and “poet” goes to “pot” Without the letter e. The “amateurs,” She’d said, “inherit everything: the sand, The stars, the world that only God possesses.” While washing dishes with a bleeding hand, She’d told them, “through ‘possession’s’ double ‘esses’ There’s a line that cleaves; things come apart; ‘Refrain’ means both ‘hold back’ and ‘go again’; Things join in wholes of which they are a part.” She “touched” the people. Was it such a sin? Her broken pencil left a double line On my tab, both legible as one design.

All afternoon I walk behind the mower, Imagining, though paradoxically, That even though the grass is getting lower, What I have cut is like a rising sea; The parts I haven’t cut, with every pass, Resemble real geography, a map, A shrinking island continent of grass Where shoreline vanishes with every lap. At last, the noise and smell of gasoline Dispel my dream. What sea? Peninsulas? They were the lands my inner child had seen, Their little Yucatáns and Floridas. But when I’m finished, and Yard goes back to Lawn, I can’t help thinking that a world is gone.