Poems written by me.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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…
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?