Tim Peeler
LARRY’S ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE 89
I stood on that busted mill house porch
Watching the full moon inch through a walnut tree,
Listening to the river re-finding rocks
Over and over below the concrete dam.
Finally, I pushed the door open slowly,
Knowing he might be sitting the dark
In his overalls, a shotgun across his lap,
But there was naught and I walked
The front room through,
Kicking an overturned cat bowl,
My boot crunching something gravelly.
In the back room I saw two pairs of eyes,
A diapered walking baby and a young girl
In a burlap dress with matted blond hair,
Both of them pale, weasel faced.
Where’s your pappy, I said, but she just
Looked at me like she didn’t know words
While I searched for something that might
Be worth taking and found nothing.
Back on the porch, I saw her haunted face
Watching me through the one window,
And the moon had climbed to the top
Of the walnut tree where it nested
Like a whole ‘nother world of spun gold.
Wild Goose Poetry Review 
How can reading “I stood on that busted mill house porch/ Watching the full moon inch through a walnut tree” make me cry? But it does.
But there was naught and I walked
The front room through,
Kicking an overturned cat bowl,
My boot crunching something gravelly.
I like using the word naught, a word seldom heard these days, and the sounds I hear in these lines.
I’ve got to read this whole book now. Larry is magnetic and repulsive at the same time, yet he said (through you) “listening to the river re-finding rocks/Over and over beneath the concrete dam.” You can always nab me with a water image. I love the repetitive re-finding of rocks.
Brenda is right. These poems will definitely whet the appetite of the reader to know more about Larry. He is a very compelling character. Knowing that Tim lives just down the road from the Henry River Mill Village that was the setting for District 12 in The Hunger Games movie, I can’t help but see Larry in that setting. Two wonderfully unanswered questions arise here. What has happened to the girl to leave her so mute and vacant, hauntingly similar to the figures in Walker Percy’s iconic photo “Bud Fields and His Family, Hale County, Alabama”? And did Larry not find anything worth taking because there was nothing or because his humanity made him incapable of taking anything?
This is definitely set in one of those old mill houses in Henry River. Scott, this is Larry at his most mercenary, so I would say that he actually found nothing worth taking to pay whatever the debt might have been.
Larry’s terriffic! What a great vehicle for a manuscript (!!!). esp. like “nothing worth taking” and the way it mates with that “whole ‘nother world.”