Wyeth Thomas

Sitting in the Crowd at a Rodeo, I Think of Cerasi Chapel

 
 
July nights are when the walls of this world
seem thinnest. And so we wait in the grandstand
for something shimmering to punch through,
 
not grace exactly, but maybe grace’s surly uncle.
Roscoe Jarboe rides Chicken on a Chain for eight seconds.
CoBurn Crawley rides Blueberry Wine for three.
 
Dusty Goodnight gets his teeth kicked in
and bleeds a lovely gumbo. In Caravaggio’s Conversion
on The Road to Damascus, Paul lies bucked from
 
a skewbald horse, blind to the cocked foreleg
trained on his breast. Bald Peter, riding the tilt
of a cross, squints from his canvas across the chapel.
 
He’s old, and without his glasses cannot see
that it’s Paul rinsed in godlight. Perhaps, Peter thinks,
it’s an angel with pry bar come to yank
 
these spikes from my hands, Thank God! Or perhaps
it’s Him come donkeyback (that palm-plaited
ride so long ago). Or perhaps it’s—
 
A sashed queen gallops an Indian pony in fluttering
circles as we ride the earth’s spin into the ear of night.
 
 
 
 

Wyeth Thomas is a recent graduate from the MFA program at Brigham Young University where he studied poetry. His first published poems recently came out in the Gettysburg Review. In addition to writing poetry and short fiction, he is currently collaborating on a biography of the Welsh poet Leslie Norris and finishing an article about Ted Hughes’s ecopoetics and environmental criticism.