A friend and one of my favorite poets ...

The Man Steps into Nettles on his Way to Mass
Driftwood Press (July 2014), pp. 90, 91

Thank you Tobi for permission to post your lovely poem.

Dressed in his “church pants”, he cuts through a field
like a rabbit on skates. Late as he often is, he’ll get “the eye”

from some chuntering old usher—get nothing but grief from postman to pub to his mother and wife,

who left ahead of him–early–gently walking the road, the sway of her contentment like a velvet metronome.

Sometimes they walk together—he pestering the edges of her hair with bawdy words that pink her cheeks,

that she’ll remember later, after family obligations and a quick snippet of cake allow for their own time,

curtains pulled to shadows, a vase of yellow on the table and the two of them, a rippled alchemy of lust and love.

But not today. And now the nettles, thick around his legs like fire ants, pay him back for being slothful,

one of his sins. He will sit toward the back and pray
for the sting to dissolve in the distance, his whispered psalm.

Tobi Cogswell