Tag Archives: memory

128. Seven roadkill

I.

The flowers are dry now

two days after I picked them 

from a trash can in the dirty alley.

White with violet edges,

they didn’t belong

exactly where they were.

I have many prayers 

circling my hands.

 

II.

Bigger than I’d expected,

that beaver lay

like a large dog 

rolled up against

concrete fencing the bridge.

I touched his fur, 

left a dry rose, felt

someone had to.

Trucks were in a hurry.

Under strong sunshine, his fur

radiated cool.

 

III.

A voice rose sharply

ripping off the night silence,

caroming between red brick

buildings before rising

high enough to dissolve.

I rode it three blocks

arrested by its gall,

then lost it on a time curve.

 

IV.

In the dream you died

beside me.  I wish

you would quit 

shagging night roads–

I wake sticking 

to cotton, sweat cold.

 

V.

Cars lined up all the way 

on back to Grayling Creek

waiting for men to clear

viscera and motorcycle parts

off black tar.

Giant Sand rocking,

earth-roughened brown fingers

tapping, I watched buffalo

graze an oxbow

of the Madison

remembering, 

ten years ago,

a double rainbow

that touched down here;

apparently not a mark for 

this guy’s pot of gold,

this man whose heart

whose brain

bit the road.

 

The ambulance

drove away slowly,

slowly… 

a bad sign 

so I crossed myself.

 

VI.

Out on the island birds sing

all winter long

disregarding cold snow

that hangs them up in trees.

Squirrels don’t get hit

by cars, nor beavers

and the deer are shy.

Whole days move aside

when I walk there,

remembering rich bouquets

of woody solitude

while fear drives by

overhead on I-90,

reasonably and prudent.

 

VII.

The dogs hung out

catching wind, wild

with the odor of cattle

in their warm snouts.

Sixteen hours north

of my own take-off,

curiosity met the horizon,

flat interest,

roadkill.

123. Caged

Behind the grey chain 

link fence, a coyote who has worn out 

the grass all over. When I stop to look 

he trots to a worn adobe shell

staring sideways,

            hating me.  

I let my hands hang, claw fingers stuck 

to the sun-hot links, let

my 

            hate 

flay a world that would catch

a coyote, weave wire around and

give him nothing but a shell

of white-washed mud

to contain his fear

            and shelter his hate.

 

The force of his eyes blew holes in the adobe.

In the dark his brothers sing wild hymns.

 

They say he was injured, that 

            this

is how they saved him,

death assumed to be less

than any life.

It can’t be true.

118. Long Hair

When I took 

what came to me 

I took 

Idaho pool halls with 

old men coughing phlegm 

and young men staring bullets

at serapes, bare feet,

at bracelets,

at our beer crossing the wood bar.

Neon flashed our long hair

into snakes of flying highways.

 

When I took 

what came to me

I took Quebec-quoi love songs in RV’s 

rocking under original tunes

 and the brown eyed boy 

thinking out loud in accented English

into my long hair,

limp from acrobatic highways.

 

When I took what came to me

I took 

bottle flies crawling corners

of bloodshot eyes beside ditches.

I took

thick fog holding my arms in gloom

under sequoia canopies.

I took fish

offered from withered hands 

under California cardboard. 

 

When I took 

what came to me

I took 

crowds behind glass under stars,

sweet smoke long in my lungs

 and a pull off Glen Fiddich,

overlooking unpaved highways

scratching and scraping their way.

I took 

red earth against my damp cheek

smelling of safety when I woke at dawn

beside graveyards prickling

the air with white stones. 

 

When I took what came to me, I took

what came, 

satiated by novas of my own 

flirtation, inhaling with abandon 

the exhaust 

of winding highways, 

clouds in my 

long hair.

117. In A Perfect World

 

When old women stop taking 

care of children and pets and 

grown boys and houses they may

notice the age of their hands and 

wonder why they look like the hands

of grandmothers when their minds 

are still young and harbor dreams.

 

When old women have no one 

to feed except themselves,

the mirror may become a study 

of how so many memories could fit 

into such a compact body, and shrinking.

 

When old women rest they may find

beauty in the strange rhythms

of a lifetime, though they may have 

composed a very different symphony 

in a perfect world.

110. The Diner

the car

parked during the night

holds 

one corpse.

 

startled her 

half out of her skin

in the morning half light.

the door was unlocked.

 

across the long highway

is a phone tacked up

on a power pole

catching two hundred

miles of wind 

with its sharp corners.

sometimes the phone 

works.

 

thirty-two miles north

in town

the ringing

woke a sheriff.

 

by eight he was gone,

the corpse

leaving tire tracks

of the coronor’s rig.

 

all that’s left here

is the woman’s nerves

strung taut between sage.

all that’s left here

is the end of a man’s story

rolling across three ranches

like a tumbleweed.

109. Fieldwork

 

Walking across Wyoming

I fell for you, your curls

sweat plastered, your eyes

changing blue to green, your

flirting with waitresses while

I watched laughing for your shy

young hands hiding. I fell

longing for the touch 

of your brown hand brushing

my brown hand, my bleached

hair tangled in your mistaken 

fingers, exchanging Farka Toure

for Fugazi, breaking

my eardrums, my patience,

my grown wild heart.

 

Days are shrinking now, hit hard

by winds that parch, skinning

sun raw by desert sand

carried. At night I hear radio 

voices clattering between our tents,

restless and urgent. Walking, I see 

fire-cracked rock buried 

beneath sand, the way

our eyes plant explosives through

the unnamed senses. At night

you visit philosophy, torturing

breakfast and still …

 

Spain is one half-assed plan 

to work through winter, one

idea cooked up on a stormy day

of crackling lightning and a missed

tornado. Next, Cuba, but no one liked 

that, not even you knowing

about the whores and cuba libres

and hot sun, hot salt on skin.

Or Argentina has friends waiting,

long digs and pampas like home,

all in Spanish. If we both

rode an airplane to Patagonia

would you even hold my hand

shoo the Latinos from their lust?

Or would you indulge your own for me,

turned south and wild with hunger?

I fell for you like that hail

fell hard to earth last week.

Hug me, miss me.

107. my aunts

.

my aunts look like my

mother as they age, lovely

eyes and smiles that blow

all the fuses. their blood

pulses ancestral coal and tin, skin

slick with a ranch’s fresh

stench of branding: in this case

.

colts and

madness and

– oddly –

social justice a rich seam, shot through

the bedrock of calving and misogyny.

.

rage and shame, too, evenly laid,

thin but

persistent lodes snaking

through each sister.

.

how alive two are yet, how 

men stunted them all,

the girls. 

now they fade.

they stare out across dry lawns,

all the colts broken

.

and we cousins sigh,

softly and half lost like the ranch

left fallow for our

winter.

105. long memory

.

just under the prairie

grass are my people, dry and

quiet now, dreaming up

.

all the buffalo 

hoofprints of ancestors

long slaughtered.

.

just under the grasses are my

own handprints set in the stone

heart of earth, well buried.

.

this pale body … so different

now only the clouds might

recognize me. 

only the 

clouds might remember me

and they don’t sing out. 

.

99. he died

.

saturday stretched across decades, snapping in

around memories better left dormant,

one hour as long as the drawn gun lifting

to point, the sigh and quickly

missed lunge. 

some thoughts own every space left

between seconds, claiming a self

well lost, inviting

redemptive desire –

that impossible movement

of forgiveness, yet 

never granting that which be so

desperately

needed. 

.

​​what a day –

drinking tea at the 

table, windblown snow rising

outside the glass.