We remembered rain once
and talked about flowers
and then we rode five days
without saying a word.
The horses kicked up dust
and we’d been riding so long,
the sky grew thick and lowering,
a collapsing roof suspended.
We noted the bloodberry blooms
around the drying lake bed
where the sometimes islands
grew into always mountains
where dead buoys lay
like the bleached skulls of robots.
These were good signs.
We pulled our guns and made
our way toward the farther shore.
—
Sometimes a title comes and you build a poem around that. This one gets filed into the occasional series of narratives involving wanderers in a drought-stricken wasteland. Should be lots of good source material around here this summer.
(The Sometimes Islands are the occasional islands that appear in Lake Travis during drought years.)
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
And the title has a great rhythm to it too, which leads into the rhytms of the poem. Excellent.
A wonderful kind of dusky, sad, forlorn beauty in these images!
Thank you, both, I appreciate your reading and your comments.