In one of my favorite haunts, Crossfire Canyon, the creek is flooding as at the lake upstream water jets from the dam’s spillway for the first time ever. The spring runoff is not even halfway through as a record snowpack melts from the Abajo Mountains upstream and runs down into the desert.
But here at WIZ, [...]
I would say I feel cold but no
That’s not right—I feel dark.
Winter has begun glooming bone
Half so bright with fire as once cheered.
This arm and shoulder upon which I fell—
They make a rough fit. Especially
I feel it there. My eyes rummage
Squat days for glints. In my chest
There’s a catch, these lungs losing
Appetite, thin instants off [...]
A solitary hawk beneath
a sky of lavender and gold,
assumed the vantage of a tree
and there reconnaissanced the cold.
Once-melting drifts of speckled snow
grew stiff against the freezing ground.
The humid gusts abandoned hope
and left the air without a sound.
What once was flowing now was tamed;
the rivulets, muddy and curled
lost strength and stream, as puddles became
glass windows to [...]
(February–March 2000)
crimson-honey sky
across the Hokianga
crimson-honey tide
but no waka to pierce
the bay’s narrow hips
*
crimson-honey sand
across the Hokianga
crimson-honey sky
but only one cumulus
to lick the bay’s narrow tongue
*
crimson-honey night
across the Hokianga
but no moon
to walk empty shores
sip crimson-honey tea
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For Tyler’s bio and other Spring Poetry Runoff contributions, click here and here.
*Non-contest submission*
I
The Rancher Speaks
I was in the sheep business for years.
Sold off my sheep and got into the cattle business and now I have friends.
The cattle men talk to me.
I suppose what finally drove me out was the predators.
The eagles swooping down and taking newborn lambs
and there was nothing we could do about it.
We tried noisemakers [...]
Today the secret names of everything
come back, the ancient names.
Tribe-of-the-morning names
call to me from the wind, which I know
as shut-your-eyes-breath,
hands-over-your-ears, gone-with-the-ice-song,
hymn-rising-out-of-cottonwood-sap.
Smell-of-dogwood; it is called,
smell-of-willow.
Daffodil has become again
small-pusher-of-earth-and-snow,
light-out-of-stone,
seawater-turned-sunshine.
This morning has its own name,
separate from all other mornings,
fire-in-the-clouds
waking-in-the-folds-of-mountain,
joy-of-long-shadows.
And now spring has brought
mist-in-my-breath,
shining-on-the-rocks,
quick-and-noisy-in-the-canyon,
to make soft soil in the garden
where I kneel for the first time
on the almost-warm-gift-to-growing
and work [...]
At five in the morn I gaze upon the Earth
Holding my little one so innocent and mild.
Hoping that I might have a chance
To feel her trails of glory
The midnight rain ended soon,
Leaving clean the outside world
I glanced through a crack to catch a glimpse
Of Nature’s hallowed view.
Crisp, Clean, Calm the scene lay before my eyes.
Each [...]
October, what will you bestow? You’ve left
the tulips and long daffodils unborn,
and spreading ferns aloof in darkest glens;
your brown leaves have revealed a scarlet thorn
to snag the frosty mornings. Mallards will
not light upon the weir, and open skies
remove their lightest blue. The fallow rose
is waiting for the spring–and like my eyes,
discolored branches search for green. [...]
(For Beikake)
both in white sarong
I bend you through the font
watch fabric rise
on water troubled
by the currents of death
______________________________________________________________
Mateu, Matem (Gilbertese): “my death, your death.”
_____________________________________________________________
For Tyler’s bio and his other submission to the Spring Poetry Runoff, go here.
*Non-contest submission*
More than any winter I had known, that winter.
In evening I pruned against winter’s loss.
The sky echoed from the first spring’s rain.
At my touch, the tree quivered, beading.
The tree arched like two hands cupped,
reaching up, fingers outstretched.
Sarah stood in the light of the door,
leaning against a white pillar,
calling me home from the dark;
as each branch [...]