Poetry

134

David Hightower’s lyrically expansive meditation on the whims of fate and the unpredictability of the human condition fill the pages of THE HANGING MAN DREAMS with thrilling music and mesmerizing imagery. Hightower’s richly infused voice echoes the eternal wisdom of classic literature even as it stakes its claim to a bold new vision of poetry as a more than capable vehicle for every experience from the chillingly macabre to the sublimely transcendent.
Long established as one of the American South’s best kept literary secrets, David Hightower is a poet with gifts worthy of a world audience. His works have appeared in such publications as the following: Atlanta Review/Cotton Boll; The Atlanta Quarterly; Georgia on My Mind: An Anthology of Contemporary Writers; Georgia State University Review; Lullwater Review; Old Red Kimono; The Savannah Literary Journal; Share; and Wind Magazine.
(Hanging Man Dreams art by Bill Amos)

THE HANGING MAN (from the series)

The full moon is the axis,

the sky the wheel,

earth the mill,

life the water leaping the spillway

tossing gifts of diamonds to the unseen sun.

I hear the music of liquid,

singing a language I suddenly understand.

Mysterious syllables bubble through my veins;

I am the sound I hear.

I am a trout plucked out

from my green dream

by the revolving wheel.

My world spins away from all direction,

neither up nor down.

I will myself to dive,

feel my fins spread like wings;

I drift into the sky.

I am grain being ground

into a fine dust.

            © David Hightower

 
 
 

Excerpt
THE WHIRLYGIG KING


Colors of dreams creak and whirl
filling the old man’s hilly acres.
Carved things with wings
soar against the sky;
hawks, owls, crows, eagles,
bluebirds, bats, demons, angels.
Down the hillside
he gives wings to everything.
A green fish swims through currents of air;
an orange lion roars in grinding gusts;
a jointed snake wriggles through rattling weather;
loose-limbed figures dance together
to the tapping of their own small feet.
Flesh of wood and nerves of wire
spin with a breeze transformed to breath.
A stick tree swirls rainbow blossoms;
a circus yellow sun rises and sets;
Adam and Eve in a carved garden
raise the cherry-red apple of death,
yet never quite take the bite.
The old man is like a young boy
forever emptying his pockets.
He makes the shapes the clouds make,
playthings for the wind.

© David Hightower