David A. Bart - poems
  • Intro
  • Home
  • Kingdom Come
  • Tunnel of Love
  • Exit Now
  • The Passion
  • Texas Education
  • Dumb Supper
  • Good Year
  • Toys
  • Saint Michael and the Devil
  • Invisible Knights
  • The Rain Gauge
  • Ponder
  • Remainder
  • Green Ghost
  • December 13th
  • Dedication
  • Prevailing Wind
  • Dreamland 1911
  • 10
  • On the Median
  • These Things Happen
  • White Water
  • The October People
  • Scene from a Moral Panic
  • Estrellita
  • Another Ending
  • What We're Dealing With
  • How Did the Foxes Die?
  • There was a Man
  • Bio. and credits
Picture
Exit Now


An historic marker
and tombstones grow fluorescent
on the roadside, stern billboards
lit by the glaring video store.

The drive-thru girl flirts
with two weeks notice—a boy
who’s never shaved wants
to save her from the Dairy Queen.

Pages from Bible coloring books
tint the windows of Sunday school,
thorns and scourging softened
with crayon and manila.

The Rock and Bowl mar
quee
says 9/11—we will never forget
Saturday is 2 for 1.

Most everyone is in before dark,
unaffected by this virulent Spring,
a muffled detonation of lust and pollen.

Others go into the night
elated or circumspect,
drawn by April’s chilled nectar,
warm sidewalks, a nodding flagpole.

From the highway, sodium vapor glows.
Maybe this will be the night
things begin to change.
One car in three hours,
the exit ramp is a narrow hope.

Then a long, steel glimmer and exhausted roar.
A dual row of heads,
dwarfed and hazy
in the broad glass of a Greyhound.  





The Weight of Addition, Mutabilis Press, Houston, 2007
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