This Animal
She pounces and chews on a tennis ball
when I kneel on the rug in the living-room
to stretch my legs before our morning run
along the river on the new bike trail
they poured over the defunct U. P. line,
where she’ll head west along the right-of-way
and I’ll follow, conscious of her leading me
out of complacence and once again
into a world she can sense somehow, still
blooming at the end of that ancient track,
and I know if I let her take me back,
let the rotten fruits of knowledge fall
like crusted scales from a blind man’s eyes,
I’ll be with her today in paradise.
___
Old Photo of “Eddie”
In rolled-up shirt sleeves and rolled-up jeans,
big white western hat tipped back,
revealing your wealth of thick black curls,
you straddle some early boyfriend’s bike
outside an old firehouse garage,
leaning forward on that vintage Harley,
grinning at the camera, mother’s little sister,
looking fully ready for The Great Escape.
And if you’d known what lay ahead
you’d have kicked that cold machine to life
and roared away without one look back,
rolling out of reach of what no doubt was
already in hot pursuit and gaining fast,
decades of abandonment, poverty, pain,
leading to that illness doctors couldn’t cure
and that death not one would speed.
___
Season of the Long Shadows
In October
when the year begins
slowly sinking toward its end
face north
and close your eyes
on the path of the old migrations.
Hear lost echoes
of a feathered tide
rolling overhead in waves,
and feel again
the ancient earth
cast into treeless shade for days.
Watch vast flocks
drawn to alluring calls
descend from the heavens and disappear,
as another living
piece of the planet falls
to the leveled guns of the marketeers.
______
Platte Valley Girls
(for Ashley and Shelby and Kasey and Paige)
When the robins wake you in the spring,
lie in bed a moment, listening
to their sweet voices beneath your own
breathing in that peaceful space, your home.
And when the summer frogs on the river start
chanting lullabies, each taking part
in that ancient chorus at the long day's end,
close your eyes and drift home with them.
And late in autumn when the geese begin
their long ride south on the cold north wind,
each of them urging the others on
as they follow the arc of the planet down,
let your spirits rise and fly with them,
back with your sisters to your home, within.
______
Waiting for the Cranes
There's a boom-town out on the local lake,
augers roaring, shanties popping up,
dozens of fishermen kneeling on the ice,
jigging for panfish with two-foot rods.
First weekend in March, and it's fifty degrees
as I chip my spud through a foot of ice
and set out another tip-up, hoping
a big northern passes by and takes my bait.
Just a week ago long lines of geese
were headed back south on a blizzard wind;
now, here and there a hopeful robin
probes for worms in the shoreline grass.
So it goes in Nebraska, every year
the worst and best times battle it out
in these tentative days the weathermen dread
either side of the vernal equinox.
Though in a week or two we'll be looking up
as a heavenful of southbound harbingers
aims their singular prayer at the Platte,
calling the season down.
______
. . . and Golden Needles
A few days after they burned the state grass
off the field between these spring-fed lakes,
I imagine the stalks, some shoulder-high,
crackling and eventually uniting in a roar,
wild flames rising, razing the field
like a hungry beast, trailing smoke,
leaving nothing but a few burnt saplings
scattered across a thick carpet of ash.
Drawn to the calls of Canada geese
paired up on the bank of the south-most lake,
I follow my dog this April evening
as she crosses the field’s soft black mat,
where leaves of grass have already sprouted, and
already woven through those short green clumps
a suspended maze of webbing so fine
it would be invisible in any other light
glows now, near dusk, the perfect angle of the sun
illuminating this laser-thin feat of engineering,
and the whole burnt earth feels mended here
by these spinneret-born miles of silver threads.
___
This Dog Hunts
She lies in the shade west of the garage,
scanning the sky, scenting the morning,
out on the lawn I mowed yesterday
before our run down the hike-and-bike trail,
that section closed now, after the flood,
where I turned her loose as a wish on the world
and she sprinted down the nearly unmarred trail,
every mark erased by last night’s rain
but a few fresh tracks of coyote and deer and
no doubt those pheasants she broke from the trail
and burrowed through the waist-high grass to point,
before my approach sent them clawing skyward.
But it’s September’s now, and all she wants
is to be out there, because . . . |
