Letter of Recommendation

I am writing on behalf of the wind in my son’s hair,

which, at least in this photograph, is always there for him,

always cooling his cheeks and suggesting new scents

from over yon dale, you know the one, just out

of sight from the cidery yard where his friends run

with him into the alchemical twilight, which clothes

every living thing in the ephemeral silk of youth,

which is only enhanced by the wind that carries downy

seedpods and pollen, giving the light something to shine

through, and the wind does this all thanklessly, so humble,

remaining mostly unseen, bowing down low in the grasses,

sometimes precisely in one branch alone, more often

broadly present, bearing the soft, steady answer

to the long question of what it means to be free.

First appeared in The Georgia Review | Included in If Nothing (Jan. 2025)

Listen to Derrek Sheffield read the poem via Spokane Public Radio

Every Gift Carries a Cost

It is difficult to go back

into the burning

into the bitter bowl

the knife

my grandfather gave me

carving char & resin

its plastic scales

meant to approximate

bone    my grandfather

now only ash & shards

of bone in a bag

in a brown cardstock

cylinder no bigger

than my fist    bound

with twine    I can’t

look at him as I use

his knife    as I smudge

the silver glint

against the heated

glass aching for

a chemical dose

of what I think must

at the cellular level

approximate the bodily

feeling of love

first appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal | Included in If Nothing (Jan. 2025)

What Luck

I lived. Lived again. Wrecked, 

hungover. Swerved in the dark

from river back to bunk

and never hit a tree. Never was

pulled over when my only 

tongue was Swamp. Locked 

my keys in the trunk in a thunder

storm, done hotboxing the Cimarron 

with can’t remember, car halfway 

in the road. Aura of blunt, pungent 

as roadkill skunk. Always made it

home. Always stumbling thick

tongued, lucky if I didn’t get the spins,

mumbling if I had to speak, numb

thing dumb in the truest sense.

Floor was floor and I was on it, gone

wind in a way. Also stone.

Somehow sang even undone. 

Almost alone, even throned

among future tombs, I lived, 

the coal of my heart on a slow

burn, no time to lose, no such

thing as time, eyes tuned 

to the lack of light, skull

locked tight, crowned alive, the king

of lost keys.

first appeared in Gulf Coast |Included in If Nothing (Jan. 2025)

In the Year of No Work

I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stake
my spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in the ice
bucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring,
to fit the skullcap and pierce the eye with a toothpick,
the body double-hooked, my fingertips glimmering
with the scales of the dead while the line whined free
from the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal current
on a point in view of   the town where I lived,
where I had become a man
                                                       with no money,
suddenly concerned only with money, for there were mouths
and I had helped to make them —

The eddy swirled, kept my line taut, my
whole body taut though a man a few down the row
laughed, sitting back on his bucket while he pulled in more fish
than he could take.

I hated the other men, hated the ones who caught nothing,
who crossed lines or hooked gulls, who plucked even birds from the sky
and slowly drew them in while they struggled and looked away, even,
finally, in the hands of the man who only wanted them free.

I climbed the breakwater and fished and spoke to no one.

I baited my line and thought of a woman
who would carry my body over the threshold
of our small white house simply with her eyes
because I had brought something home,
for her, for us, our boys at my side
while one fish was divided and indeed did feed many —

(Now to sift the facts for truth):

I reeked of   the sea and had nothing to show for it.

Darkling saltwater for a dream
and no other place to be.

 

First appeared in Poetry (November 2013) | also found in House of water (alice James Books, 2016)

It's the Boat That Haunts You

And so it is, the boat has come to own you,
has learned to speak a language you cannot help

but agree with, its voice the dark lapping
of water against the hull, its song the wind

in the stays while you sleep, dreaming of a bowsprit
to hold you against the waves, and the boat

curls golden bracelets of cedar
around your wrists as you plane each

plank, its touch the dream of a body becoming
whole—to make the shape, to be shaped—and the boat

says please, says the honed edge
against clear grain is my small prayer to your devotion.

May you forget your life, may you
always be close.

 

First appeared in New England Review | also appears in House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016)

You can find more of my poems online in the following venues:

From If Nothing

One poem at The Georgia Review

One poem in the Missouri Review

One poem in Waxwing

Six poems in Only Poems

Two poems in Wildness

Two poems in Tupelo Quarterly

Two poems in Diode

One poem in North American Review

From House of Water

Six poems from Poetry

Two poems at Narrative

Two poems at Verse Daily

Two poems at AGNI online

Three Poems at Fogged Clarity

One poem at The Paris-American

Three poems at Connotations Press