Michael Lauchlan

 
Getting a Drink

and the usual crowd was there—St. James Infirmary Blues

Like the last speaker of a lost tongue
a singer braids an account and a guy
at the bar says                      Hey this

sounds familiar         as it should   
being so very old—a deathbed song
a blues compendium          When I walk

home through a hot Michigan night
the road hisses past squat
houses in a quiet evaporation of hope

as in a mountain village where the lake
has shrunk and tributaries stammer
and the one well’s so deep

that words for rope and thirst
echo the squeak of a turning winch

Sensus Communis

My old black lab was skunked
and her six hundred thousand
brilliant olfactory neurons were
screaming with a stench from hell
and her furious dog-shaped hide
contained only skunk.

Wild with it, she flew past me,
got through the storm door
knocked over chairs, rubbed herself
against every surface, and tried
to dig through the mattress on our bed.
Before I could drag her to the garage

she wrecked the house. Knowing
so little of grief, I screamed at her.
She’s three decades gone now
and tonight I’m limping down
Exit 202 on a blown tire,
hearing the horizon growl.
 

Michael Lauchlan is the author of the poetry collections And Business Goes to Pieces (1981), Sudden Parade (1997), and Trumbull Ave. (2015). Running Lights is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. website

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