Tom Murphy

Windward Editors are pleased to highlight work from Tom Murphy's new gorgeous collection of poems, Pearl. Murphy is our fearless leader of the People's Poetry Festival, and a great teacher, friend, mentor, and supporter of our creative community in the Coastal Bend and Southwest region. The body of his poetry over the years, including his first volume, American History, is a searing indictment of tyranny, and an elegiacal treatise on love and loss. Particularly relevant now in the imminent face of fascism violently unfolding in our cities, as citizens protest police violence against black people, and the Black Lives Matter movement leads our fight for racial justice reform, Pearl joins this historic moment in illustrating our collective fight against erasure of our communities and human dignities in the face of corporate, oppressive forces. Of Pearl, Carol Coffee Reposa (Texas Poet Laureate, 2018) writes "Use of form and tone varies too, from haunting elegies, luxuriant prose poems and stream-of-consciousness meditations to sonnets, muscular villanelles and blistering social criticism: "You want to bring your guns to my class?/....When the OK Corral breaks out, I'll be yelling, 'Kiss my ASS!'"  His poems rise above confession and protest, though, to touch resounding chords of love and loss, despair and redemption. In his full-throttle search for the sacred, Tom Murphy ultimately maps the genome of the human heart, leaving readers the richer for his quest."

Fall

Golden rod, burnt orange and firebrand red
flutter bunches sail through the canopy like spinnakers
to an array of paths that skirt smoke mountains
to the narrow roads that carve the Blue Ridge 
to the still lake bottoms’ depths full of compact varve,
carpeting the forest floors.

Golden rod, burnt orange and firebrand red
cover battlefields of dead and forgotten warriors from the Iroquois to the Algonquin
from the whipped slaves running for their lives following the north mossy tree side to the pine cone
     burning raid on Harpers Ferry
from the graves of Tom Wolfe in Asheville and Lowell’s Kerouac to the tombs of Confederate and
     Union alike in their scatterings of pitched fights to drawn-out battles and charges 
from the black lung coal miners, the meth labs hidden on hill sides, the alcohol-fueled car accidents
     on blind turns
from the French Broad, the Susquehanna, the Rappahannock, the Shenandoah, the Merrimac and
     the Kennebec.

Golden rod, burnt orange and firebrand red
colors of spring’s death mask all with vibrant hues stolen from dawn and sunset
that wait to be blanketed by a dusting of snow, falling through the bare grey skeleton branches of
     Appalachia.

​Lower Barron
 
One of the oldest sections of Barron Park as evident in a 1948
photograph. Road once led to the California Military Academy.
Barron Avenue narrows before La Donna, first curve to the left and
slaloms to the right, hugging the curve in the street where
smaller houses with deep narrow lots, some built for summer
homes, for city residences—get out of the fog belt and chill
where Mark Twain said, “the coldest winter day he spent was
in July in San Francisco”—down the peninsula in a cottage on
lower Barron.
 
At the corner of El Camino de Real next to a car repair shop was a
turquoise half round building, once a dry cleaner, a kite
store, an independent package sending location—hot-diggity-dog.
Façade changing over the years, chipped but still there today. Dad
drove us all up towards home fast, passing Jerrold and a young
black man, who stood on the blacktop edge in front of the Felice’s
home, Jerry’s home—we missed them, inches to spare—the black
man spun around as I turned to look, double fingers and rage—on
lower Barron.
 
A late dinner on the opposite side in the Smith rental home. Bill, a
year younger, had already gone to bed after playing “Suicide Is Painless”
on the clarinet. Rea, his mom, was having a good time and spilled her
wine. Her husband, not Bill’s dad, dragged her into the bedroom.
Screaming. He came out and said, “Sorry.” Mom and Dad and I said
goodnight. In the car, starting to back out, Rea came out--
grabbing keys out of her leather purse while crossing the lawn.
He came again and dragged her back into the house on
lower Barron.
 
Later, in the late 80s, English X lived across from the old Felice home.
X had bought the Tavern downtown from his cocaine dealership. In that
house X was indicted for child molestation of his two-year-old daughter
but after a decade of ownership it was time to sell and sell for cash only,
X had said, when we tried to broker a deal—it was good that bar sale fell
through. X planned to skip bail to play soccer in South America. 
Instead, he called the cops, told them his big plate of coke had been
poisoned by someone. If only the paper article had his picture too, on
lower Barron.
 
It was a pretty peaceful walk to the closest bus stop, to take the 22.
I would ride it to Stanford shopping center and transfer for Santa
Cruz Avenue where the psychiatrist told me to beat a couch--
then got on the floor and showed me how it was done. He only charged
$125 a session—well worth it since I’m still here. I also took the 22
to work at Crown Books, and everywhere else around the Bay Area
but I broke apart when they chopped down the trees behind the bus
stop bench and across the vacant lot behind the car repair shop on
lower Barron.

That Asteroid
 
That asteroid burns through the atmosphere
                                        blazes and scorches the air
plummets in the Gulf of Mexico near Yucatán
like no other cannon ball-slamming the silted
bottom throwing steam and clay into the sky
like no other hydrogen bomb—the tsunami
follows the shock wave, killing off anything
that’s still alive. Seventy-six million years ago.
 
The lingering stench long dissipated,
only the bones and fossils left. We’ve
tapped with long drill bits that mulch layer
of black muck we call oil—roughneck refined
that motors us about—choking the world
to best an ancient rock that broke open
the watered earth. Indeed, all our acts
are another repercussion of that asteroid.

​Tom Murphy’s books: Pearl (Flower Song Press 2020), American History (Slough Press, 2017), co-edited Stone Renga (Tail Feather, 2017), chapbook, Horizon to Horizon (Strike Syndicate, 2015). Murphy is the Langdon Review’s 2021 Writer-In-Residence. Featured Poet at the (Rio Grande) Valley International Poetry Festival. Recent work has appeared in Boundless, Locust Review, Tejascovido, Haiku Page, Langdon Review, Red River Review, Windward Review and other select journals. Work forthcoming in Switchgrass Review, Langdon Review, Locust Review, Concho River Review, Writing Texas, Waco WordFest Anthology, Wine Anthology, Corpus Christi Writes. Murphy lives in Corpus Christi, TX.