PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Thomas Lux

PoetryMagazine.com

Thomas Lux
USA

Thomas Lux has two books forthcoming in 2012--A Child Made of Sand (poems, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and From the Southland (nonfiction, Marick Press). He is Bourne Professor of Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He lives in Atlanta.

These poems appear for the first time at PoetryMagazine.com and are printed with permission of the author.

They are forthcoming in Child Made of Sand.

FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW

Whom says: Here’s a tomato. Slice it.
You do: one side rolls left,
the other right, and both
show you the chambers
of their split hearts, their slippery liquids,
and seeds,
which you take, eat,
because of their abundance.
Across a small pond
a boy squats by the edge
stirring the water with his hand.
His father is five strides behind,
too far to stop him if he topples face first.
The water is black but shallow.
It’s been literal eons since alligators live here.
The boy falls forward, or he doesn’t.
The worst, or best, that can happen: his father,
laughing, lifts him, by the seat of his pants,
two seconds submerged,
from the water. Either a family joke, or,
for the boy, shame
and a lifelong distrust of water. Thanks, Whom.
Nobody ever sees Whom around.
Whom gets credit
for what Whom never lifted a pinky
to do, or not to do.
Whom doesn’t have, I don’t think, a pinky.
Nor do I think Whom would know what to do with it
if Whom did.

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