(in another pluvial July, New Mexico)
In the moonless riot of midnight,
the cleaver-like torrents of rain
hack hard soil to the bone,
turning creeks into raging rivers
where dead mesquite twists and bobs
in paroxysmal recklessness, rain-
maddened into battering rams
caving in chunks of banks
big as the loads of dump trucks:
rain rivalling the violence
of a concert pianist practicing,
thundering the keys of his Grand
through Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier”
whacking his heart,
racking his body with rapture.
Larry D. Thomas, the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, has been privileged to be a regular contributor of poetry to the Green Hills Literary Lantern for more than two decades. He has published twenty-three print collections of poems and several chapbooks, both in print and online. Among the journals in which his poems have appeared are the Taos Journal of Poetry, Southwest Review, Puerto del Sol, Christian Science Monitor, Poet Lore, Southwestern American Literature, Right Hand Pointing, Texas Review and Arkansas Review. His papers are archived at the East Texas Research Center of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas.