Praise as Acrostic
by Ellis Purdie
Looking for snakes with an old man, a recent friend
about my father’s age save for one
month, who also drove a GMC truck but red and rickety. Horse-
power harnessed, his beams cut the night, searching dirt
roads for prairie kings, gulf swamps,
or anything before he leaves for good in June.
Passenger side, I look over and think of myself at 67,
even then finding God in spot-lit gravel,
long-learned and settling for a whippoorwill diving for moths
taken with the headlights, like dead leaf feathers sewn together
into a beaked body, pecking ground before becoming white
snapping blinks in the dark.
Call this worship:
a ritual held to until I am bedridden and
left only to the memory of moon-
light glinting off paint scars
incised along my Tundra, steering wheel
gripped by brittle hands that like all of my body
are shaped by a knowledge of place
seen so many times
that even in dying
eyesight, a bird’s leaving for darkness is more like light
rescinding towards light, worth seeking for just one more glance.
Ellis Purdie is a graduate of The Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Along with writing and teaching, he spends a good deal of time looking for herpetofauna in east Texas, where he lives with his wife, son, and daughter.
