by James Brush
Category: Poems
Poems written by me.
We’ve been in triple digits most days lately. Too hot to do anything, even walk down to the neighborhood pool. Seems almost too hot to write so here’s a rerun from 2006:
Chlorine bubbles
Teenage lifeguards
Lap lanes
Sun
He can’t hold his breath that long
She swims, swims, swims
Swim
She can’t hold her breath for him
Holding hands
Holding breath
Chlorine water bubbles
Break like glass
Smiling faces break the mirror
Sun
Swim
Summer
Ten more laps
Five
One
Holding breath
Holding sun
They hold each other
Swimming
Only Labor Day
(so far away)
Dispels the dream
Of swimming, sun and
Water love
Chlorine swim
Sun five
Breath one
He will hold his breath for her,
Offering it like sunshine gold
From wrinkled hand
Swimming, she accepts
Breathes the breath
Of summer sun
Evening Star Rain Lilies (Cooperia drummondii)
It actually rained here last week. Free water fell from the sky. Now, these starlike beauties have appeared everywhere. I stopped on my bike ride to photograph a few to ID, and was pleasantly surprised to discover their starry name.
evening-star rain lilies
along the trailside
a blanket
for a few more
cool nights
The sky is the east
bound highway. Winter
trees hold hawks.
How many miles
can we run
without radio?
The engine fades,
the rumble of the road,
its hypnosis.
Weave in and out
between trucks.
There’s more freeway
as much ahead
as behind.
this backyard wildlife…
a congregation awake
discovering spring
≈
a new mourning dove
on the fence by the feeder
studies the others
≈
young squirrels—
so much thinner
than the adults
≈
a new family
house sparrows chirping
the busy backyard
≈
six house finches
learning the hummingbird feeder
sun-sparks in water
≈
fledgling goldfinches
flap inexperienced wings
on Easter morning
—
This weekend, we were treated to families of lesser goldfinches, house finches, house sparrows, mourning doves and fox squirrels coming around the backyard so the adults could show their young where to find the food. The juveniles were clearly just out of their respective nests as they were following the adults around flapping their wings and chirping to be fed. It’s never long before the babies figure out how to find food on their own at which point they will be indistinguishable from the adults.
I’ve seen this in the backyard with black-crested titmice, common grackles, mockingbirds, cardinals, Carolina chickadees, and Bewick’s wrens, and it’s one of the joys of feeding birds (and squirrels) but I’ve never seen so many at once. It was, quite simply, stunning and humbling. Songbirds don’t live long and most don’t even make it through their first year, but I like to think that at least some of these birds will be out there for a while, maybe waiting for me to count them one day down along the pond trail.
—
Publication announcement: My haibun “The Grackle Tree” from my Birds Nobody Loves series is in the latest issue of the ‘zine Nothing. No One. Nowhere. Thanks to the editors for publishing it along with so many other wonderful poets. It’s an honor to be included.
mercury drops
rolling through palms
faster than setting
summer stars
whose ancestors shed
the iron in our blood
follow the electrons
to noble gasses
follow the moon-eyed
smiler to his treasure
peel back the asphalt
by the factory
find mercury balls
rolling marbles
in our soft
and willing hands
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.)
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.
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.