Country Dark

D.A. Gray

Outside the city limit signs the trees
bring night before the sun sets,
sky hiding in a silhouette of cedar, oak
in the thin lines between them
souls of the departed. A soldier
I once knew who wouldn’t say
he had nothing waiting for him back home,
in the days before shooting himself.
An old girlfriend who thought she
could make a left turn in front
of the speeding pickup truck, just before
the phone call dropped. My grandmother
who desperately wanted to tell me
a story I was too busy to hear.
A boy amid fragments trying to breathe.
An Iraqi father whose rake looked much like
the barrel of a rifle to a nervous kid.
Seven o’clock contains a howl;
it’s the dark we see just past
another person’s head. Sometimes
it says nothing; sometimes it whispers.

---

D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (2017) and Overwatch (2011). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Comstock Review, Still: The Journal, and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. He holds Masters Degrees from The Sewanee School of Letters and Texas A&M-Central Texas. A veteran, Gray now teaches, writes, and lives in Central Texas. Of his two poems in Collateral, he writes, “The residue, even a decade after returning home, is that of having a foot in each world—one in the present and one far in the past. An existence punctuated with silent moments. ‘Country Dark’ and ‘Twelve Years Ago I Leave You Stay’ come out of that residue.”