Winter Chinese Tallow
by Larry D. Thomas
Having tossed to the wind
its sophistry of leaves,
it looms in the January sun
a skeleton of its former self,
a monument of bark
and stark nakedness
casting shadows on the earth
black and angular
as the arthritic feet of crows.
Like the sinew and bone
once hidden beneath the hide
of a beast in its prime,
grinding in the gumbo of wetland
to shock what meets the eye
with dread and fall beauty,
it basks at last in the glare
of revelation,
all dark and frozen verb.
Larry D. Thomas, who served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, has published 24 print collections of poems and several poetry chapbooks, both in print and online. Thomas and publisher/poet Clarence Wolfshohl are privileged to have a “correspondence in poetry” titled Wolf Tree and Agave currently in press at Spartan Press of Kansas City, Missouri. The collection is comprised of 66 “letters,” 33 by each poet, which contrast and compare the flora, fauna and culture of their respective residences in the Chihuahuan Desert of far West Texas and the moraine of central Missouri.
