gleaming from the low-tide mud, a gorgeous mud
mottled with rocks and kelp. Then a shadow moves
and the first bird is revealed. A second tiptoes
alongside, then a third; a flock of fellows moving
lightly over the uneven surface. Sanderlings.
Over to the left, another, and since now I am
focused, I see a fifth staring, like I have been staring,
at the ocean’s edge where the waves carry rills of sunlight.
Tom Freeman
On Foot, Joliet, Illinois
A girl heading the other way
stopped around 2 o’clock today,
rolled down her window, “Hey man, have a peach!”
It filled my fist. I recrossed the road pressing
my thumb into the fuzzy skin, just overripe.
My eyes moistened for a second.
Not yet hungry, I tucked away
the strange girl’s gift.
A juicy ball of sun medicine,
my soft secret hope.
Hidden peach in the pocket
of this rough, frayed work coat I wear.
At Sunset
Orange glow in the western sky,
rain has stopped,
dust plastered down along the dirt road
hedged with pungent wet sagebrush.
Passionate electrified guitar
wails from within adobe walls
of a small home at the base of a scrubby hill.
Out in the dusky road a lonely young man passing by
listens, smiles, says “thanks” under his breath.
Breaktime
After pulling mean musk thistles all morning,
sweating torrents in a rain coat and welder’s gloves,
I spread peanut butter with a skinning knife,
seated in the driver’s seat of my rusty pickup
parked in the pasture up to the side mirror in shining grass.
The cows browse, sun glaring
on the black muscles of their backs,
and test the new fence line.
The young calf ducks right under.
Sun spots and shade play in the field
as clouds shift shapes and float east.
The insect trill heightens with each flash of heat.
I want to learn to see the wind in the grass as a girl I love
and she as the grass in the wind.
I think that’d be my heaven.
Keep the rest.
I lick both sides
of the knife edge clean.
Thirty more minutes
lost track of and it’s
back to work.
Moon Chat Transcript #10
I get up too late, sit in soft moss,
and wait for some rustle
in the leaves to wake me.
No wind. Not even a breeze.
Past girls I might have tried harder for,
friends I lost track of, come to mind.
I wonder what screens me often from
that straight shot look into
the real skin of things.
Down ravine, the creek glints, out of earshot.
The word is another body turned up in the Cuyahoga valley.
Two kayaking ranger’s found her in the river north of Boston Mills.
She’d been missing ten days.
She’s not the first.
Men tend to dump them just off the trail
where they think no one will look.
I imagine, in their guilt, those few acres
seem like the only place to hide,
a shred of second-growth woods boxed in with blacktop,
shards of dim light beaming through the canopy,
a murderer’s one hope at forgiving himself.
Leaving my camp, I step carefully among the weeds.
and dead shades of brown leaves.
I’m not saying I forgive the killing of innocents. I don’t.
But if there’s any place that withholds judgment, it’s here,
deep in trees, where no one watches.
Where you take a leak wherever you please.
Where men leave their old bald tires and
mushrooms or coneflower grow up through.
Where the only trace of who you are,
or who you’ve been
is the leaping of frogs,
and shimmer of the surface that accepts them.
Yardwork
With each twig lifted from lush grass
I screw up my face to hold back tears.
I came here to scape land that I guess the man tends
so diligently in this narrow green floodplain
to escape the stark aridity
that might whisper him awake on the edge of town.
For weeks, before I bring the mower through the tallest grass,
I’ve been filling tarps with brittle fragments of Siberian elm,
sometimes brushing up against the little cabin
where he now tells me his son swallowed a gun
barrel one New Year’s Eve.
The boy had been found a month before
crossing the Bitteroots into Idaho half frozen
with only a pocket knife and blanket to his name,
committed to asylum then released.
He would be my age now.
I grow quiet, leaning on a leaf rake.
I would’ve walked beside him on the highway shoulder,
long into cold Bitteroot night,
borrowing hope against the darkness,
against the snow lit slantwise in the rush of headlights
like showers of Gemini.
George Longenecker
Nest
Wrap me in your wings,
hide me high in a white pine,
weave me a nest with your beak,
line it with downy feathers,
sew it with fine thread of nettle,
twine it with silk of milkweed,
cushion it with pussy willows,
braid it with milk of moonlight,
let me feel warm breath from your beak,
let me feel your heart beat against my breast.
Rock Point, Ontario
Lake Erie’s waves polish limestone fossils,
Devonian sea tides once lapped this shore,
where children ponder trilobites and wander
the bed of the salt sea from which they came.
Gulls sweep low over Rock Point Beach.
Lighted freighters float across the moon while
night beacons flicker on a distant shore—
the lake howls with gulls and freighters’ horns.
At bedtime children in sleeping bags
curl up on the warm limestone bed,
cuddle up to the lullaby of lapping waves,
sleep all night in fossil seashells,
coiled in a bed of time.
Arctic Refuge
All day the sun circles the horizon never
setting, orange at midnight, white at noon
as we float downriver to the Beaufort Sea—
at first rapid current slams our rafts
against stones, but soon we float calmly—
the distant Shublik peaks cast shadows
far across the tundra, a snowy owl circles
white as we drift north in twilight.
In the hills fireweed and paintbrush bloom,
the owl swoops and lands on the high tundra,
fossil coral and seashells lie everywhere,
the remnants of tropical oceans—
beneath arctic stone dinosaurs sleep
in crude petroleum—maybe enough to fuel
the world for another six months;
refined into jet fuel, pterosaurs would fly again,
leaving tails in the sky above the Arctic Refuge.
Next day we float north past a bluff where two
stone heads—Inuksuk cairns—keep watc
h
as they have for a thousand years over
the Inupiat and their river.
In the distance Arctic sea ice cracks like
thunder, on the horizon ice and sky
meet in a mirage; tundra swans trumpet
as we float north past dunes to
the sea. All night the orange sun sits low
while a snowy owl waits in silence.
Let the pterosaurs and allosaurs sleep
another fifty million years.
Hurricane Irene
All day water pounded on the roof,
poured down in sheets while white pines
whipped in the hurricane. Houses shook
and windows rattled, air pressure dropped
as low as it had in fifty years, but barometers
could never measure this storm.
Tiny streams gorged themselves on the deluge,
became monsters who lifted huge boulders from beds
where they’d lain since the last glacier, the flood
heaved stones, uprooted trees and hurled the mass
downstream into houses, water gushed through
windows, shingles, boards and beams buckled,
cracked and splintered then rolled down into rivers
risen far over their banks—no longer minor tributaries.
All over Vermont from Waterbury to Bethel
from Rochester to Marlboro the water rolled,
streetlights flickered then went out. A crushed
car floated by, its interior lights still on, coffins fled
an eroded cemetery followed by a swimming corpse,
its stiff arms flailing. Two huskies howled and howled
as their dog pen filled but nobody could hear them
over roaring water and pounding stones.
For twelve hours it rained and rivers rose
even more quickly; people ran for high ground
before they could be washed away—no escape,
only pounding rain as railroads twisted like licorice
and roads turned to gorges. A covered bridge
splintered against boulders and the very water
which quenches and cleanses rolled its timbers
downstream with even more stones and trees.
The next day it was warm and clear—
at first light strangely silent, already at dawn
an odor of decay as water settled,
brown and still, blue jays called.
Finally, as clouds lifted, the mountains
could be seen, slopes still green, sirens wailed
while crows hovered, waiting, diesel engines roared,
but it would take months to fill and fix what Irene had done.
Slowly the flood receded and stones settled,
floodwater seeped out of houses and left oily muck
on every plate and chair; those who could returned
home, saw what the water had done and wept.
Cardinal on a Cable
A cardinal sings from his perch on the cable,
happy for another Florida dawn;
his call is the same as cardinals everywhere—
but what if he were plucked from his wire
and instantly landed in New Hampshire
where it’s zero minus fifteen today?
What the fuck, he’d say, now what?
His cable perch carries news
of war in Syria and northern cold,
but he calls cardinals with his own news.
Why are some spared war and cold, others not?
Robert Frost knew . . . that for destruction ice
Is also great. I too would perish tossed
nude into New Hampshire this morning—
at least the cardinal has feathers.
But we’re here in Florida,
on our screened porch having coffee,
grapefruit and cereal, while you, red cardinal,
sing to us from the television cable.
Kimberly Sailor
The Bitter Daughter
My father
never says Thank You.
A family fish fry for his 60th:
bronzing jukebox songs and a hotel stay and grandkids in swimsuits
fuzzy on the bottom, fizzy drinks in hand,
steam from the winter water
and made-to-order eggs on the other side of the night.
Result: one photographically documented half-smile.
Exhausted daughter who tried.
A hilltop gathering for his 65th:
noodle soups, crisp salads, pizza for fifteen,
and a custom cake with a wide-mouth bass.
Leaving work early, grandkids packed in the back,
harrowing January roads, cars in the ditch,
but not ours: we arrived, with candles too,
and that fancy party hat I wanted to burn
after he snapped the little string and said,
“Get this damned thing off me.”
His face was red like a cardinal’s back.
The grandkids made the hat their bugle.
Result: we’re only gathering for the descendants now,
these milestones better left unrecognized.
My father
feeds his yard birds dutifully each morning.
Black oil sunflower seed for the showier singers,
yellow millet for the tiny fliers,
kernels for those who forget to
or would rather not
leave during winter anymore: too old, or too well-fed at home.
No thanks there, either;
but under his care, the birds stay.
In his kitchen,
a clock with birds instead of numbers
starts the bluebird song,
chirping mechanically as I make his morning coffee.
“Too weak,” he decides, emptying it down the drain
before grabbing his bird seed bucket,
straightening his hat,
and sliding the glass doors open to leave again.
She Won’t Know
I carry the dead bat with a shovel.
My husband, working in Missouri,
my daughter, asleep, her old baby monitor just in range
as I move the bat from driveway to woods.
“Intact?” my husband asks.
“Yes. Probably still warm,” I say. “Just fell from the sky.”
The woods are slender but useful:
the neighbors drag over dead leaves on tarps,
abrasive and crunchy over the road’s asphalt.
The city keeps a pump house behind the ash trees,
pleasantly humming as it cycles water on a schedule:
loud and quiet, loud and quiet. Hasn’t broken yet.
I won’t tell my daughter about the bat,
the same kind she visits at the zoo
next to the sugar gliders in their little huts.
That’s part of motherhood: not telling.
Fancy church shoes clipping down the pavement with a dead bat,
or a run-over cat, or the worms she gathered and left too long in the sun:
should have been fishing bait, now just stringy compost.
The next morning, we are smiles and cereal,
wondering what to do with our day.
Lineage
My mother died in her early 50s.
I am careful to say “died” and not “passed away”
because when you kill yourself, language matters.
The first time didn’t work.
She asked if the hospital had a bookstore, or a library,
something to do, something to read, please,
while I watched Oprah between vital assessments.
The second time took.
I received her old earrings,
an odd photograph of myself that printed poorly
(don’t know why she saved it; can’t ask now),
and a
snow globe that works if you shake it hard enough.
I like this last trinket, because she lived in the desert.
But all of this only reminds me
that I never received anything after my grandmother died.
So in love with her, I would have accepted
anything at all: a blanket from the linen closet,
a souvenir magnet from the fridge, a bent fork from the drawer.
But from her, I just have the last memories her daughter gave me.
Josephine’s Garden
We bought a delicate sign
for my daughter that spring.
Josephine’s Garden it says, a metal oval on a stick,
butterflies behind the letters.
In her garden
poppies bloom, low to the ground for a child’s eye,
and irises too, taller than her (“taller than me!” she sings).
And while the tenderly collected rocks sleep,
twigs stuck in the ground fall down,
bits from her lunch decay for the birds,
and puddles from her watering can hands fill again,
I pose her for another photo, filed away by year.
After the flash
her eyes search for more cherry tomatoes—
her favorite, eaten off the vine, not even washed;
in the organic assault of Perfect Mom, I have made peace here.
In the corner
a farmer’s market is underway: pumpkins double in size,
giant looping vines tickle their striped watermelon neighbors,
looking like summer footballs
getting ready for fall kick-off.
From age one to two, three to four, five to six,
I watched her in the weeded rows;
she’s finally taller than those flowers we first planted.
Josephine snaps open too-small peas,
pulls up tiny carrots too early
and says: “Everything is still growing in my garden.”
And I am water, sun, and heat,
thinking about my next child:
a small turnip growing within.
Deep Sea Fishing
My line of pimples
is shaped like a Caribbean island chain.
The Bahamas maybe,
where we sail next to stingrays slapping our boat.
“Life is precious,” I say.
“Sure is easy to die,” he says.
The stingrays head north
and we thread our poles.
It’s winter back home,
where the cardinals and bats play,
my snow globe re-dusts unshaken