All the chests of blue horses muscle

mountain dawn to rain as I open

an email from a friend sneezing

among Bradford pear and redbud blooms.

Her poem rings a small bronze bell of longing

in the glazed eye of a kitten her aging dog

killed in her yard.  New bride riding wild

her own carousel of desire

past sentiment, she catalogues what’s lost

washed up on the shore of her verse.

 

There is no loneliness as complete

as those memories that leave bones

in the path of the everyday for us to trip on

just when we think we understand

the multiple personalities of love in a handful of clover.

 

I read of a thousand penguins found

dead on the shores of Southern Chile. Mysterious,

scientists say, none tangled in fishing nets nor poisoned, no

mass suicide.  Seven more penguin species

were listed endangered in December as

Antarctic ice continued its slide

to rising seas.

 

Walking red sandstone

outside Monument Valley with my love,

I found a human jaw bone

complete with three teeth.  No flesh

or hair clung to its fossilized shape.

Turning it like a Tarot card in my hand, I chose

to leave the jaw to the fortunes of wind,

its fate nestled by warm rock.

 

Outside the morning window,

mountain chickadees dare the blue thrash of magpies,

the death-white eyes of Steller’s jays.   I am

cheered by their wheeze in the pinyons,

the way their asthmatic laughter finds splinters of light

despite storms blowing up

from a horizon obscured.

 

 

"Vaste est la maison qui m'écrase"  Berber Proverb

 

What breathes between the dawn death of stars

reeks like woodsmoke caught

in the guard hairs of a mule deer

stepping through arctic carcasses of hail

spewed by a thunderstorm’s last gash.

 

Sorrow’s red road opened

in night terrors remembering

my brother who at three reached out

to wriggle his fingers

into the socket in our parent’s bedroom.

Razors of blue flame

knocked him into my screech

until nothing but the black horse

of stun reared to kick the life from both of us.

 

Where were our parents?  Arguing

over egg money or the broken Sears lawn mower

they’d forget by morning, their breathing

wobbly as bottles of Blatz beer

chinking the formica kitchen table while we

comforted our own tears

searing cigarette holes

into the bare arms of our discoveries?

 

What breathes between stars

is buried in the plastic cans

of mom’s and dad’s ashes secured

now under the pinyon in the yard,

How slow the aftershock of memory, the stink

of fingertips charred, by the stark

yap of amped volts sparking

our parents’ angry screams at our stupidity

when we ran to them for help.

 

Even at four, I gauged electricity as a kind of song—take

care of yourself syllables that gnawed

through the wires of my childhood.

 

What breathes between stars is sticky

as an orb weaver’s web, as last fall’s bottle fly

resurrected to flight, as smoky as the mule deer

disappearing between the junipers of memory,

leading her new fawns

beyond the mountain lion’s stone den.


Photo by William Pitt Root