Tag Archives: wind

poetry

a promise

Winter falls fast as
the road rises. Slow
sun has been setting
the scene for hours.

Prairie grass bows south
through barbed wire. Yellow
alone does not suffice to
describe it in this light.

It is the north wind lying
cold across the plains in the stems
kneeling, the color of ice deep inside
dry grass long before the road ices.

It is a promise, the real presence
of what is to come. And when I stop
and turn, as everything turns,
the moon, full, is what it is,

what it has been, where it will be, where it has
been from the beginning, pure cold light rising.

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poetry

The Bluff

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The field next to the house
ends eighty feet above the creek.

A soft red bank
was the end of our world.
A misstep and our fall
would not be survivable.

The edge attracted us.

We would stand as close
as possible looking across infinite
prairie, breathing wild air,
follow a hawk circling
at eye level, feel wind
in our teary eyes.

Quietly we would wait
and watch and congratulate
ourselves on not falling,
grateful the tricky earth
had not given way
beneath our feet.

Satisfied
with another successful venture,
at the right moment
we would turn our backs away
from the great gulf
of our childhood
and walk home
down a dusty trail
that has yet to be improved.

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poetry

unthinkable

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Two bridges rise from the Hudson today,
calm after the wind and snow of the day
before. Knowing the way water remembers
they go on when the river ends — over
soil rich with memory’s leavings. They
settle above the line of a hundred year
flood. The one intended to survive an
unthinkable war has turned to consider
the rust red other imagining a train
it will not stop believing the last word
long after crowds have learned to begin
every journey without putting a foot down,
to cross rivers wider than this without once
touching the ground. No track. No sound. No trace.

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poetry

weather

the ragged edge of a storm
undeniable as the ocean

between us every way
i turn paints the sky

this morning
unsettling settling

on a great wind always
brooding on the face of some deep,

on a great bird, mind flying
when the seas are heaving, on

the laughter of a cicada dreaming
the voice of the turtle, rising

ninety thousand miles on
the spiral of a ram’s horn,

where do you think you are
going? a hop and a skip

unsettles the ocean
and that is as high

as anyone can fly,
from one breath to another

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poetry

Crapping Out

When told to quit smoking
or to slow down his drinking,
he’d smirk and slur, Ah nuts,
everyone’s gotta die of something.

He expected to go like his father,
a grim-reaper-jackpot winner,
who after finishing his lunch
stood to take his dirty dish
to the kitchen sink, halfway
to the tap an artery in his brain
burst, he was dead by the time
the chicken bones hit the floor.

My father drew no such fortune.
First came the brushes with cancer
then the minor strokes that rolled
through his skull until in the end
his semi-conscious and incontinent
husk was stashed in a nursing home
where we were called to gather
bedside to listen to his lungs
rattle and his heart slowly wind
down like the watch that once
broke on his father’s kitchen floor.

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Yellow Cottonwoods

There’s heartache in these lines
cracking through once-hard ground
crumbling to course dust.

Sadness drifts here
beneath these yellow Cottonwoods
where old men sit
in distorted circles – a parlor
for the ornery and rejected –
where a can of beer
accompanies a well-worn story
told with fading bravado
fear swallowed in slow gulps.

These grains of river sand
dry in wind, sifting
through time, piled around toes
of shuffling boots, legs
dangling off a tailgate
or sitting awry in a chair
whose fabric is stretched
past the point of brittle.

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