by James Brush
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.
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.