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Author: James Brush

James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.

Dust and Guns and Sometimes Islands

April 21, 2011 • • 3 Comments

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.)

Canyon de Chelly

April 20, 2011 • • 2 Comments

Indian drums, pounding
heartbeats for paying tourists,
ripple the fabric of our tent.

Night falls slow, drums fade—
dreams of bears and annotated
histories of faded dangers.

In the morning, woodsmoke and coffee,
the whooshing collapse of tents,
engines mumbling readiness.

We drive the rim and hike
down to the White House Ruins,
trailing fingers along the stone.

I look through my camera,
searching for what Ansel Adams found
in those Anasazi lines.

I struggle to compose his vision
in my viewfinder while Navajo men
sell dream catchers, chuckling as they watch.

—

This is an older one that had been sitting around the hard drive for a while. This week has not been conducive to poetry writing. Too much hectic and not enough sit and think. There might be a few more oldies this week. Hopefully, next week (if not later this week) I’ll be able to write again. I am still doing a poem-a-day over at a gnarled oak, but I was already doing that anyway.

Thanks to the kind folks over at the NaPoWriMo site who listed Coyote Mercury as the featured site back on April 17. Just in time for me to take a few days off. Oh well, one can always keep trying.

CSI: Sky

April 15, 2011 • • 6 Comments

The hawk is an acrobat and an impostor—
he flies with vultures and when he banks
his lighter plumage blazes in the sun,
betraying him to anyone down below with
eyes to see and secrets to conceal. The butcher
hides in plain sight among the forensics birds;
it’s a good procedural crime drama. I search
the woods for evidence, but these guys
are too good, too thorough, and I wonder
how I stumbled into this perfect scheme.

Walking the Dogs on a Spring Evening

April 14, 2011 • • 6 Comments

something about the moon
the orange evening sky
the way houses
become blocks of shadow
the jingling of the dogs’ leads,
their rabies tags
the hiss and whirr of sprinklers
a man watering the lawn,
hose in one hand, a cigarette
and beer in the other
that orange sky
mockingbirds singing slower
bats swarming just above the trees
a deer watching from the trail
ears twitching
the dogs leading us home
as they have for millennia
and that waxing moon
again and again

All the Way

April 13, 2011 • • 3 Comments

Asphalt miles vanish beneath ever-thinning treads.
Sometimes a truck passes and the car trembles.
The truck fades, a memory in the rearview mirror,
and in that distance behind us, we see freedom.

In the miles between radio stations, voices crackle
from Mexico from Flagstaff, islands in a static soundtrack.
The lines on the map folded on the dash become
highways through the desert, the smile on your lips.

From pine-shrouded campgrounds to painted ruins,
roadside motels to cars, wrecked and rusting in the desert,
and in the night-crashing waves of the western shore,
we learn the meaning of these secret messages:

rhythm of wheels, music of static, your hand on my knee,
the elegant whisper of trucks traveling the other way.

Roadside Artifact

April 11, 2011 • • 6 Comments

Along a southeast Texas highway, alone in a field, a missile points into a blue sky from behind a screen of trees, their lower trunks blackened in a perfect line by Hurricane Ike’s saltwater surge. The missile’s joints are rusted and whatever markings may once have identified it and warned away godless commies and damned Yankees are long faded leaving behind a tattered egret-white coat of peeling paint. No identifying information lurks at the base unless it’s been swallowed by the grasses of the coastal plain, which in a less droughty spring would now be alive with the ten thousand shades of a wildflower revolution.

a rusted missile
aimed toward the springtime sky
windblown prairie grass

For Gasoline

April 8, 2011 • • 7 Comments

Her name was Gasoline;
she was my goddess.

I chased her down highways
and through years.

Driven mad by her
perfume and shimmer,

her invitation to ride,
whispers of adventure.

She ran me a twisted road
to strange cities until

somewhere in the traffic,
the heat of endless delay,

I stopped
and forgot the road.

But she’s still out there and
though her name is cursed,

she still smells like freedom
and wild younger days.

Like an Asteroid Toward the Earth

April 7, 2011 • • 2 Comments

Dusk ripples
across the pond.

A great blue heron
stalks sunlight
along the reeds.

He snags a fish,
turtle-sized,
from the water.

He flips and swallows
the fish, which falls
down his gullet
like a rabbit
through a snake.

His neck straightens;
the fish is gone.
He shadows dark
along the shore.

Don’t you wonder
if that fish
ever believed
in herons?

—

This post in included in I and the Bird # 149 over at Twin Cities Naturalist. Sadly, this looks to be the last edition of I and the Bird. I’ve been participating off-and-on for 5 years and even hosted it once. Sad to see it go…

Coyote’s Bone

April 6, 2011 • • 3 Comments

There’s a cracked old deer bone
in a small field by the stream.
It’s been there for years
and every few months or so,
it moves a few feet. Maybe
a season goes by and it’s buried
in the grass and wildflowers, but
when autumn comes again,
the bone resurfaces like driftwood
from an ocean turning brown.
I wonder what coyote picks it up
only to spit it out a few steps later.
After the bleached taste
of years and sun-dried blood
on brittle bone, does he go
to the stream to drink away
the taste or let it linger, a reminder
of all the songs he still can sing?

Legend Says

April 5, 2011 • • 6 Comments

Legend says
this land was sculpted by golf pros who only knew how to make a buck.

Legend says
there is a secret zodiac of yet-to-be trademarked corporate logos.

Legend says
the northwest passage was built by Bigfoot but is now owned by crows.

Legend says
there was a cat who joined the circus to run the big humans act.

Legend says
trees are the heretical thoughts of stone, but no one understands.

Legend says
the woman on the lake bottom sold her sword business for a taco stand.

Legend says
there was a man who named three oceans and drowned in a river.

Legend says
all night, the cities beneath the plains hum that tune stuck in your head.

Legend says
the Loch Ness grebe got lost on migration and settled in Oklahoma.

Legend says
everyone has three teeth and a tongue that aren’t attached to them.

Legend says
a man rode out of town and returned with an elixir made from cheap tequila.

Legend says
words are keys, but the doors were all busted down by thugs years ago.

Legend says
I don’t want to go to bed; tell me another one.

—

This was based on one of the prompts at Big Tent Poetry: start a poem with the phrase “legend says…”

—

My sci-fi haibun “Dear Old Stockholm” is up over at qarrtsiluni as part of the translation issue. Be sure to check it out and while you’re there have a look around. There’s a lot of great work in the issue.