2 Poems by Catherine Pierce

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Bullet Is a Good Name for a Horse

………………“But in the middle of the second verse, I got tired. I had a tune, and I didn’t want to waste the

………………tune; it was a nice little melody, so I just wrote a quick third verse, and I recorded that.”

………………—Bob Dylan on “John Wesley Harding,” Rolling Stone (1969) 

I told myself it was all right to still love 

the gun in old Westerns. Because 

it’s maybe six chambers, maybe a small magazine, 

and maybe it kills a man, yes, and we write 

a song about that, but it’s one man, 

or maybe a few, but not fifty-nine people in a dance club 

or twenty-seven in an elementary school,

and everyone who dies is fiction, after all. 

I told myself it was all right because of all the preparatory clicking, 

the theatrics of spinning and drawing, 

that built-in escape time. Because today 

no headline is about the Winchester. 

Because once I sang “John Wesley Harding” as a lullaby 

to myself, sweet lilt of how he traveled 

with a gun in every hand, and felt tall-booted,

fierce-spurred. I wanted to be horseback. 

I wanted to be outlaw. I was young

and thought a song could be a talisman.

Like if I wore a raincoat of rifles-

in-verse, I could walk through a shoot-out unscathed.

Forgive me. I know a jamming six-round

pistol still killed some mother’s son. 

I know raincoats work best when made

of vinyl, or nylon, or gabardine—

unromantic fabric, dull as legislation.  

Dylan added the “g” to John Wesley Hardin’s name 

by mistake, or maybe because he wanted

a better story, one unfettered by facts. 

He chose the name because

it fit the tempo he’d already written. 

He had no idea, he told the interviewer,

what his song was about. 

Thompson Island Trail, in Fall

Deer crackle and flit into the pathless woods, 

where our sons want to explore, 

where the sign says don’t. The marsh 

is flooded today as we cross the footbridge. 

No, not flooded—full. We can hardly see 

the mussels under the rushing water, 

but we know they’re there. We walk through 

the giant hardwood forest, the stands 

of loblolly pine. The fallen oak, rotted and rich 

with lichen and turkeytail mushrooms. 

At the trail’s end overlook, the fiddler crabs 

scuttle and glitter blackly in the marsh mud, 

their unwieldy single claws upraised, 

impossibly invented creatures. 

Yes, you can go off trail, we tell our sons. 

We watch the crabs, the marshgrass, the abandoned 

red rowboat. Our dog pulls to keep going. 

Behind us, the boys are climbing a tree, 

their voices sharp as they bicker. The sky 

blares blue. An egret stalks invisible fish, 

strikes at the water like a snake, swallows, 

stalks again. The silence between us 

hums with bay-spark and late October. 

Impossibly invented, all of it. 

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Catherine Pierce is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems, most recently Danger Days (Saturnalia 2020). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA Fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

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26 December 2022