In memory of Cydney W. Adams-"School Days" by Keith Harvey

School Days

A two-wheeled trailer, parked
on a hill in a pasture near Nacogdoches,
casts a silver shadow
toward an anemic creek
with water the color
of a fly’s eye,
as a November sun set.

James, a bottle of Jim Beam
in his hand, said to Cyd
and me, “I love The Dead.
I love it something awful.”
He guzzled the last swallow
of the pint and threw it against a stump.

I opened a Coors that James had driven
to Dallas on a whim to buy and added,
“Me, I like those mystical Germans-
Hesse and Mann, with their long, serpentine
sentences slithering down the page.
Tonio Krüger or old Aschenbach.
That’s for me.”

Cyd, pulling a rotten tooth
from his dwarf sized mouth,
the true poet among us,
sucked on a Camel and said,
“Thomas. That’s the ticket.
The old Dylan.”

James staggered to the trailer,
crawled beneath,
to lie on the earth and sleep.
He wrapped himself in a red blanket
that my Choctaw Granny made me.

“What the hell are you doing?”
Terry asked.
“Resting,” he replied in November
in the piney woods
in 1974 at the end of the war.