Barry Ballard

TRACKS

It's tempting to believe we lived in simpler times. -Stephen Dunn In a space that didn't need a dominant voice, a few workers were prying up unused railway track. And the cottonwood and locust limbs were already bending toward them, waiting, trying to make sense of the clamp and pull of fingers at their throat. It moved away with what Dunn would have called a dust- like shroud of "enchantment," a bleeding end that left me wondering at what did or didn't exist: its bed that stood like a scar-hardened ridge stretching from no certain place to the past of another, and the dying eye of an Autumn sun estimating my cautious pass through the broken maze of all its absence.

DREAMING MY OWN PRISON

There's a routine of uncomplicated rehearsed moves painted in bright prison bars from the light seeping through the east end blinds. It is nothing in the place where it stays, thinking of "self" before words are created (still remembering last night's song of stars weeping after the years of their decline). From those empty hours my history is played as if I was burning a cold morning into clouds of radiation, ravaging through the poled forces of magnetism for enough heat to melt my fear, a sketch roaring from its deep furnace about managing the concrete side of my surrealism. Barry Ballard's sonnets have most recently appeared in Smartish Pace, Rosebud, Hollins Critic, and National Forum. Recipient of the "Explorations Award for Literature" from the University of Alaska and the "Boswell Poetry Prize" from Texas Christian University, Ballard has also published three award winning chapbook collections, the most recent being "First Probe To Antarctica (Bright Hill Press Award for 2002).

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