Dallas the Legend
He was taller than me, my younger brother,
neighbor friend and his two cousins.
He could throw a hay bale up onto
a flatbed truck with just one arm,
so his cousins said,
and was a veteran of Vietnam.
Dallas lived on the farm.
But where? Was he married?
Did he have kids?
At 14 I did not know.
A single weekend camping at
his mother’s muddy catfish pond
just a week before the move to high school
was my first and last glimpse
of the mystery man.
The skinny farmboy seemed a giant then.
I later learned that he lived alone
in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse,
in the sandhills
half a mile from the nearest road.
Where you can find his memorial stone.
.
The Villanueva Floors
Given a task and what to do?
Commissioned to make the worn pine
boards “look good,” dad said—”just
do the best you can.”
Down on knees, gloved hands
pressing hard the cotton washcloth,
massaging in the tin of wax plus stain
made the floors alive again.
My running shoes, dirty with river clay
from early that day, with stuck-in sandstone dust,
were left out on the back porch,
leaving my feet oddly cool in socks,
never to lay down another footprint in the house.
I would have stayed there the rest of
my life with him—the rest of his life.
The lilacs bloomed purple out in front,
the valley you couldn’t take your eyes from in back,
summer hummingbirds coming in close to sip nectar
from the hanging jars.
© Tom Gengler
Tom Gengler has been writing poetry since his mid-teens. He has had poetry published in Progenitor, Blue Collar Review, Exit 13, The Worcester Review, ONE ART, Streetlight, and forthcoming in Straylight and Westview. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
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