Gayle Compton

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2021

Call Me Ishmael

Gayle Compton

Once I believed in Endymion.

Once Keats, the bard of joy, sang to me in "mused rhyme."

I read Moby Dick in a front porch swing and heard the sea's rolling symphony beneath the swinging bridge.

Once my mother drew water and the rusty voice of the well chain was the Pequoid's farewell to Nantucket.

Hanging off a C & O coal gon, I blew in at the Cape, bearded, unbathed and swarthy.

With my clothes in a cardboard box I rode the Greyhound bus to the mills of East Chicago, Indiana.

I saw hellfire trundled on an ingot buggy and breathed the sulphurous breath of Satan.

Clinging to the wheel of a '54 Mercury like Queequeg's floating coffin, I found at last the return road to Peabrook.

Abraham, my dear old redbone, rose stiff-legged from the porch, whining and stretching, his eyes full of memory and forgiveness.

Gayle Compton, a hillbilly from Eastern Kentucky, lives up the river from where Randall McCoy is buried and attended college on the hill where “Cotton Top” Mounts was hanged. With deep affection, he tells the story of Appalachia’s common people, allowing them to speak, without apology, in their own colorful language. His prize-winning stories, poems, and essays have appeared most recently in Sow’s Ear, Now and Then, New Southerner, Blue Collar Review, Kentucky Review, and Main Street Rag anthologies.