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Larry D. Thomas – United States of America

Poet

I’m Larry Thomas, and I presently live in Alpine, Texas, which is in the trans-Pecos region of far West Texas. I just moved there a year ago, having lived in Houston forty-four years, my entire adult life. I did grow up in Midland, Texas, so I’m finally home.

Nature, and especially landscapes, inform a lot of my poetry. I just feel a very strong connection to place. That is because of a reverence for Mother Nature. But the book I will be reading from today, The Red Candlelit Darkness, is about the Terlingua, Texas quicksilver or mercury mines that were flourishing in the early 1900’s.

The mines were worked by Mexicans who came across the Rio Grande River, because they could make wages that were double for the same kind of work in Mexico. Of course, mercury was a very toxic substance, and the mine was cited many, many times by federal authorities for safety irregularities. There is a cemetery there in the old Terlingua ghost town that I visited many years. The graves, many of them are collapsed, and the crosses are just collapsed. It takes decades for them to rot in West Texas because it is so arid and they just left them there.

It is one of the most amazing cemeteries that I have ever visited, strange things happened. The wind is always blowing a bit and it was as if the voices were speaking and insisting that their stories be told. That led to some research into the history of the mine, and I early realized that most of the research was dedicated to Howard E. Perry, a Chicago industrialist who established the mine, and very little was written about the lives of the Mexican miners who brought the valuable substance into the sunlight.

I would like to read two poems that, I think, speak to the whole collection.

Little Rivers
(Chisos Mercury Mining Company, Terlingua, TX)

In his dream, the crosses
chained to the necks of virgins
are melting, sizzling down the cleavage
of their breasts, searing the flesh
of abdomens, thighs, legs and feet,
rushing in little rivers
toward the Rio Grande.

In his dream, the crucifixes
hanging on the sanctuary walls
are melting, leaving trails of fire
on the stone cathedral walls
and ancient wooden floors,
rushing beneath the doors in little rivers
toward the Rio Grande.

The crosses and the crucifixes
are melting, scorching the muddy bottom
of the Rio Grande, rushing
up the banks on the Texas side
and brimming the flasks
gleaming near the mouth
of the growling Chisos mine.

(from The Red, Candlelit Darkness,
El Grito del Lobo Press 2011)

The Screams
(Chisos Mercury Mining Company, Terlingua, TX)

Every winter,
on cold, moonless nights
at the cemetery,
I hear them

whooshing like ghosts
trapped in a bell jar,
some from the joy
of a job, others

bubbling with blood
and the frothy spit
of a rabid dog.
Every winter,

on cold, moonless nights
at the cemetery,
so muffled
they’re barely audible,

they swish
inside the snifters
of my ears like scorpions

issuing from the buried,
each dark grave
the caved-in shaft
of a small Chisos mine.

(from The Red, Candlelit Darkness,
El Grito del Lobo Press 2011)

www.larrydthomas.com

http://sites.google.com/site/larrydthomastheredcandlelit/