Author Archives: Natalie

9. The Ranch

The ranch is a raw

longing for sweet clover’s warm

evening scent, the

dirt of my bones, a single

nightingale’s melody

hung against Bear Butte.

Memory scraps rustle

under low branches, fragile

prayer flags falling, lifting

and falling on the stripped

plum trees in the old wash.

Little good ever came of

that damn place, haunted

by broken dreams and 

madness, children 

cringing and working hard,

hard hours.

 

Scraps and poverty … still,

this deep longing for pieces that

I never actually owned.

Not in this life.

How far we each travel

inside. Inside our long 

memory, our soft eyes

remembering every star

as if in its proper place.

8. The Blizzard to Follow

Sap is running fast,

fast through the maple

tree’s muscle, a humming

rhythm of brisk sunlight.

 

The geese are shouting out, back

from the waters that never

freeze, shouting out to each

other as they swing overhead.

 

Sandhill cranes fly 

by like a mis-engineered

experiment, warbling 

incessantly, landing like 

accidents, and 

 

two swans stretch, settle

quietly in the shallows, perhaps

sensing the final blizzard that will 

hollow out this windy day.

7. Stars in My Hair

One razor of reflected light

cuts cleanly across the oak

tree trunk and stars have fallen

into my hair, tangling me

in their mad experience 

of space.

 

Only occasional nights 

lose themselves to lit 

infinity, acorns as single prayers

to root impossible beauty right

into the wild earth and this

unknowable awareness, this

perfect body that I inhabit.

6. Spring Blizzard

Wind is drumming low and 

hard against the soffits, roof

truss creaking, and now one 

cat is pacing the storm

as it passes inch

by inch, drifting new topography 

where the barn stood.

Wind is crashing into 

that old shop, too, metal

siding bucking to break

free and that crazy wind vane

spinning like a rusty top, rooster

a shadowed blur against

white, white, this 

hard blown snow.

5. Old Airport Road

Today, an apple and 

one dusty walk down

a road that means

nothing to me.

Its stories belong

elsewhere, to another 

heartbeat, another 

fold of neurons

perhaps walking

my old road out west. 

Still, in this 

moment, here I am, all 

that exists on this whole track,

indifferent, melancholy.

I walk as if even now is

long ago. Who am I, 

who do I think I am, to be 

intruding on this track that

belongs intimately to others’ 

memory, nothing to my own and

what sort of time is this, diaphanous 

as passing dragonfly’s 

wings, water …  

 

already gone.

4. Late Thunderstorm

 

Thunder song tucks me in 

under her heavy body, remembers 

me when I knew the burr oak,

very young when clouds 

shared infinity with me, time a 

whisper of an idea. I do not 

miss that home, exactly, always lost anyway

to settlers who stepped on fallen leaves. 

I miss older days, even

before acorns and lightning

when the hills were longer,

we were younger and lay still,

grass bending quietly, 

quietly.

3. end truth of beauty

now i pretend to understand nero

fiddling while rome 

burned to the ground. 

what are the choices after all,

run here or there to 

witness what, 

do what, 

say what to instigate

change in minds locked within

hate, so

broken, so

fearful of being forgotten.

.

they will be seen but

then, well, they will be well forgotten,

(as destruction eventually is)

only set aside as humanity’s shame.

.

that is the work of time.

.

here I am.

what shall i do, shout with fruitless 

grief, furious that destruction is

so easy, creation slow and 

too fragile to bear the violence

of vicious fear …

we who have seen end

states of destruction, war

zones, lost nations, we know 

yet will never 

– never – 

    convince those who have not 

    known of the foul scent of 

    burnt morals, rotting ethics.

    .

    we will not convince those 

    who think they long to feel the pull 

    of a trigger that the feel

    of kindness is deeper and 

    lasting.

    well set in bombastic 

    righteousness and brute 

    stupidity: how they long to be

    hero destroyer, thousand 

    yard stare presuming a corner on

    power over another as truth. 

    .

    they do not know,

    do not know that they

    do not want the inevitable haunting,

    the consequence, the

    longing for forgiveness that will be

    unavailable

    from themselves, never mind another.

    .

    they do not want what they

    think they want. there is nothing 

    to cherish from within an internal 

    wasteland.

    .

    no.

    so how would my

    wringing hands, turning over 

    themselves, turn minds over.

    that’s why –

    .

    – that’s why

      i would pick up that fiddle.

      to feed the burning world

      every beauty, 

      futile as it may seem.

      just to feed the 

      world every beauty 

      in the face of useless destruction,

      seeding the new world

      .

      seeding the new world with 

      the end truth of beauty.