Howie Good

GREAT THINKERS

I take the winding blacktop road that the arrow indicates I should. Cows stare dully from behind barbed wire. It reminds me of a Nazi-era law for the prevention of offspring with hereditary diseases. I suddenly realize that tomorrow I might be found miles from here wandering the countryside wearing only one shoe.

*

Trees cluster around me. The air glows with the pungency of their fresh-from-the-grave smell. I unzip to take a piss, a wrinkled old woman peering over my shoulder. 

*

I’m given a brush and a can of white paint and told to number the trees. A bird whistles derisively from somewhere in hiding. I decide right then to stop searching for the moral of the story and let words come to me instead, like windfall sticks and branches. It’s cold for spring. While great thinkers are thinking great thoughts, the ground shakes at shorter and shorter intervals. And such wind! Like the mistaken zeal of Socrates’ executioners. 

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Middle of Nowhere (Olivia Eden Publishing) and the forthcoming poetry chapbooks The Complete Absence of Twilight (Mad Hat Press), Echo's Bones and Danger Falling Debris (Red Bird Chapbooks), and An Armed Man Lurks in Ambush (unbound CONTENT).