Dog

Often I am staggered when I contemplate
The mayhem wrought by

One large and wily dog;
His wiring at the hands of Dog Creator
An awful joke upon the several owners
Previous to me;
But I am the one who wears the sucker sign
On a chain around my neck:

Sure, big fella, come along,
You’ll be fine and cared-for here.

What folly I repeat and then repeat
In my conviction that no dog is bad,
That I am friend to each transgressing smelly

Canine; I guess my father’s love of dogs

Survives in me, so I stubbornly persist

With the wrecks that come my way.

This one, luckily, has lived to bark his tale,
His damages an embarrassment I relive often
After calling my insurance:

“A wild animal has attacked the house;
The barns!
The siding’s gone! Oh God!”

Dead creatures rarely catch
My attention in the country,

They are all about, and I am hardened to their fates,

And so did not see the piles of fur and wing
That accumulated on my

Porch, only to generate more embarrassment
When the neighbor said:

“Well shit, it’s your damned dog that’s killin’ them,”

And about this time, I decided that
Such antics aren’t acceptable

Behavior in my realm,
And as the Sovereign, thought my

Wishes would suffice.

But heaps of carcass, shredded boards and

Holes big enough to bury hedgehogs gave

Way to a fine chaos my decades had not endured.

How can one dog eat a privy?

The destruction of the garden around
The defunct structure

Collateral damage simply taking breath away;
And what massive jaw,
Paws the size of paddles dug up standpipes,
Old metal tools used by farmers dead and gone?

What mindless springtime joy dismantled garden

Walls and redistributed boulders
Near-big as dog himself?

What frenzy smeared tall back with grease
As my vehicle's undercarriage

Was liberated of its hoses and gas lines?

Tell me, dog, are you tired of living?

Is this how

You thank me for your life?

Some thanks, I say, some thanks.

“Put that one down,” the neighbor says,
“He’s sure as hell no good.”

It all came down the night dog ate
The propane line
And caused a spill, the husband stuffing thumb
Into the spewing break

And shrieking loud for all to hear:

“Call for help, damnit, call the fire department,
Help me out here, help me out,

“The house is gonna blow,
Get out, get out, get out!”

“Go get the bird, and run away!
Jesus, do something

“Quick, right now!”

No one believes.

And yet I do not lie.
This graceful, buoyant, joyful, loving dog

Defies all I ever knew about man’s best friend,
Except he is, best friend or wants to be, that is.

And never would I give up on him,
Though I may go gray and lose my

Mind before we’re done, and
He is too old to rampage anymore.

It does not matter how I’ve coped,
Nor what I’ve done to stem

His mirthful havoc;
I’ve found some feeble measures and

I drink a lot these days.

Dying in Water

Flat, the August lake rests placid in mid-day,

And clover blooms above the shallow, pebbled shores,

Slow summer heat bursts scent from purple orbs

Nodding in the season’s long and waning close.

Boys swim and toss their words in splashing play,

Daring one another to swim the gentle waters,

They know the cool that rushes from the sandy bottom,

They’ve come here all their lives,

They know the contours of the shore,

They are seventeen and just begun,

They have no fears, no thoughts of mortal

Being, no worries in the languid sunny moments.

And so they swim, lean arms curving through silver droplets

As each turns his head in rhythmic breathing, legs pushing

Through the water, each thoughtless as their bodies

Slide silken through the center's depth.

One tires in the middle, and turning back to green pines

Above the clover, somehow his effort falters, some

How his effort falters, the boy slips once and

Slips again as friends grow small in steady reaching of

The other waiting side, the far shore he too sought.

He drowned in the summer of his only just beginning,

Just seventeen, just swimming in the lake.

Taos 2004: Adobe and Magpies

I go down 25, from Pueblo, and get off at Walsenburg,

Heading south, still, but west,

Into New Mexico.

Early afternoon and the light is harsh,

Flattening the changing winter landscape,

And the colors of the desert as it deepens

Are like no winter colors I’ve ever seen, but here,

In New Mexico.

Back roads twist, steep and narrow,

Past remote adobe churches perched on rocks,

The Madonna in repose in the nave; I don’t have to go in

To know where she is.

I start to come down out of the hills and see, below,

Smoke lifting from low adobe outposts

Hugging the floor of the desert.

I pass rusted pick-up trucks and falling-down corrals.

The earth is pink and the entire sky begins to turn purple—

There is no west at sunset

In New Mexico.

Low green sage bushes clump with snow and

In the pass before Taos, a squall whips around the car;

I slow to a crawl, seeing just the cloak of white.

Coming round the bend, snow stops,

Late afternoon light blooms over the mountains, and

There is Taos.

Next morning, I sit with coffee, wrapped in blankets.

From the balcony of the old adobe inn,

Again I watch smoke rising from adobe houses

Scattered in the distance behind me;

Rising from the Pueblo on the outskirts of Taos.

The valley smells of fire—mesquite and pinon—

Burning in the kivas and the kitchen hearths,

And it is the deepest imaginable quiet,

A hundred miles of quiet in the frigid early morning.

Magpies interrupt my repose; scolding, quarreling,

Calling; flitting from fence to fence,

Tree to tree, a racket I don’t mind.

Far from the chaos of home, a backdrop for the

Slow settling of my bones and breath,

High desert consolation, black and white,

Magpies startle against the blinding of blue New Mexico sky.

Platte 1950

Here: a take-apart moment—
I slow down, relish each drift of memory, 

Still alive, this past. 

I sit in my cowgirl shirt, pearly snaps catching a glint of sun.
I am almost three years old,
My hair is curly, and although the picture,
With its ruffled edges, is
Black and white, anyone looking back in time can see
That the sky is blue in an early prairie spring.

I sit on a thick tree trunk, cast at some point
After a storm, probably, uprooted from its
Mooring in the bank of the river,
And turned by wind or the push and tear of water,
Laid on a horizontal line to earth, an end just over the river,
The Platte, and so I sit, my small body straddling
The thick-laid slabs of bark,

Tossing back a glance at my handsome dad, his blonde hair
Lifting slightly in the breeze, and wearing his own cowboy shirt,
A yoke of tan over red plaid,
He smiles back at me.

The picture opens long-closed doors,
And the rest of that day begins to appear, settling around me
As the memory blooms:
A cloth imprinted with fading yellow and blue flowers,
Spread on grassy tufts a step or two away from the
River; my mother in peddle-pushers, smoking
And gazing fondly, detached,
At my brother, my Johnny, just walking;
He picks up miniscule buds and tiny cones,
Tastes skeptically and looks up at our mother
With his round brown eyes, and
She laughs, indulgent, brushes the bits
From his mouth. 

The picnic hamper has fruit; she butters home-made bread
And sprinkles it with sugar.

And that’s all.
It’s just as real, more than
Half a century gone. 

There were smiles,
A splash in the river, pretend games, parents
Vibrant in the moment, laughing,
Smoke lazing up through Russian olive trees,
Cottonwoods rustling, Johnny, my dad, and Mama,
And I am always and still there,
Still alive in this past.

· ·

Breathing Home

So there I was, sitting under the great black dome of heaven, far stars as close as an outstretched arm, ancient wise old Taos Mountain barely visible in the night, but powerfully present. And in the way of the unfettered mind, I started remembering some years back, when we tore the tangled vegetation off the privy, thinking to make a garden around it and turn the old structure into a gardening shed. A few hours later, as the sun was rolling west and closing the day, a bird flew back; sitting on the now bare metal roof peak, it squawked a single cry unmistakable in its poignancy, for home had disappeared.

Looking out across the low pinon earlier that New Mexico evening, a coyote, barely visible in the hip high scrub, paused and looked at me. I looked at him, close enough to gaze into his yellow eyes, the flash of such connection momentarily disorienting. And then he trotted off; it was his place, after all, not mine, and this time I had not disrupted home.

The living life is fragile and tensile everywhere, but none so clearly limbed and starkly seen as there, in absence of tree, suburb, chaos of what is made, not what organically is. There, all that remained, in the homeostasis of the moment, in the confluence of mountain, desert floor, and sky, was for me the archetype that feeds a soul – mine, at least. That pure form, brilliant in mountain contour, and mystic, ancient sky, miracle of changing light, was testimony to when and then, inhabited by beings wiser than the human observer.

Since I tore away some long dead bird’s thicket-home those many years ago, the ways bird, toad, fox or coyote appear have been a gift to apprehend. We share home, and we dare not forget that; our outer landscape cradles it and our inner landscape creates it. And this is how I began to think of the inner landscape of poetry; the internal architecture of my creative self, and I began to realize how the literal landscape often informs the internal one. For me, then, poetry is my internal home; the space I feel my most expressive me, and when I go to water my western roots – the Great Plains, the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, as I have since I moved away and to the east – I turn to words and the poetic form to nurture the symbiotic me, the one breathing in the same space as those other beings, hopping, flying, trotting, scampering, and making home.

At Last Barbados

I took the small white oblong pill and by the time

I awoke, flying blue-green over an ocean prairie,

Caribbean sirens sang from island to island;

Lower and lower we dropped until ground speck loomed,

Settled in metal rooftops’ hot colors, and my world had changed from

Dread to calm.

High above Atlantic sounding, on a cliff atop the surge,

Wind patters palm trees’ fronds, a sound like night-time rain; the hemisphere sleeps;

Monkeys scramble and a night bird calls faintly, once, across an answering sky,

In the morning as the eye searches for nothing but what is rolling below,

I swear I see the curvature folding horizon’s coverlet,

And Africa there, a thousand thousand miles across the deep marine and

Along the eastern coast gods march,

Mythic, pitted rocks cleaved from ancient coral reefs;

Nimble boys and old men with grey hair tied in ponytails game the surf,

And ride waves home in crests of long forgetting.

I watch their eyes see nothing but the water;

They care so much that nothing matters anymore.

Still, if I were seeking how to make my bit of clay mean something

In this world when I am gone to whatever home awaits

I’d recall and feel the scene I see; the tide comes in, the tide goes out; it pools

Among the monoliths standing on the shore.

Between the breakers water waits for an instant’s universe,

And eddies, each ephemera a different masterwork.

I will be there in the next millennium; my bones and dust at one with

This pulse of life that more than my short breath

Confirms what was and is; confirms an evermore.

November Alchemy

Last night I drove up on the ridge between the lakes,

In the solitude on the seasonal road,

Soon to close in winter’s snow,

The bowl of night encompassed all there was,

A full moon bathed the landscape in

Daylight, it was such a moon as that,

A universe according to its rhythm

In one swift moment then

Spilled upon me a revelation:

That I am of and in

This space of dust and light,

For there, in empty pastures, cloaked

In winter’s coming on

I felt of life, among the spirits from the fading stalks,

Goldenrod unblooming and dewberries gone,

The clumping of the earth

Shielding shoots and seeds within,

Until comes a spring that cold has made

Forgotten now.

Uneasy these few weeks, distracted and uncertain

And too much touched by what I can’t explain,

All gentled down and washed away into the balance

Of what has been, and what will be,

My own connectedness.

The winds come up, soon calm descends,

Full moons arrive, inexorable and pacing surely,

And there I understood, illuminated in

Those now-quiet summer pastures,

That all mystery of completed place was

Perfected in

My beating heart.