By DL Pravda

Have a cigar. You're gonna go far. Pink Floyd

Kov the guitarbuilder peers over frozen Powell Creek.
A week after wind chills hit -5, we walk with blackhawks
through the marsh of the James River Refuge.

Kov pokes his walking stick through the crystalline ice:
not wise to walk on. I kneel at the edge and shoot
close-ups of white fractals fraying blue sun.

We sit on the wood overlook and share a joint.
Point of land. Tree of hands. Clay and sand.
You can't win if you don't play/guitar. Yellow finch

harmony. Karma on bass. Kov tests the border of ice.
Prudent wisdom will not suffice. Crunch. Crack. One step.
Smash through. Step back. Maybe we're not as stupid

as we used to be. Maybe it's enough to sit and look
and listen to dead reeds chattering and the woodpecker
waiting for cocky human humor. The current continues

under solid water like good blood pressure. Windless winter day
gets late early. Trudge back to the truck, muscles complain,
but I admire the slightest break of sweat: that all ground

is momentary, all steps are chance. You can't win
if you don't dance the gravel trail balcony over the smiling
mighty river of forty years of friendship.

 

About the Author

DL Pravda tries to keep it together either by jamming distorted reverb juice in his ears or by driving to the country and disappearing into the woodsfarm dimension. Recent poetry appears in Blue Collar Review, Bookends Review, Poetry Quarterly, Rockvale Review and South 85. His book Normal They Napalm the Cottonfields is a past winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Pravda teaches at Norfolk State University.