Poetry By Tim Peeler

Mike Fritcher CC




Hoe Boy Just Wants to be Left Along
 

The yellow field devolved to long skeins of poison oak, sapling and briar--

Then the green gray inkblot of the mountain beyond, all of it empty--

Except the trespassing Appaloosa Philly and her fat boy lamb chop sideburn rider--

Rabbit scatter, rusted barrels sunk in the moss by the pine bluff--

The last stretch of banjo fencing, barbs gnawed into locust posts--

Hoe Boy comes here to think about God and the impossible way that stories travel through 
time--

How Wolfe meant the French Broad when he said Get on the boat that sways to the black 
rhythm--

He prefers the morning light that breaks over the pines above the Henry Fork--

Where time is a hollow seeming, an endless liquid bull tongue plow--

After feed, he listens to the barn’s rippling tin, clinging to bowed rafters--

And worries because the nights are a rotisserie of second guesses nursing regrets--

Wobbly relations, the pinhole hiss of water sprinkling from ruined copper fittings--

Sleepless, he sits on the gray pine bench by the crackling bonfire--

The stars hang like barnacles wedged in the black hull of Heaven--

​


​
Tim Peeler is a retired educator from Western North Carolina who has written twenty-one books of poetry, short stories, and regional histories. Most recently he has collaborated with the Appalachian photographer Clayton Young on books that combine verse narratives and rural images.