Wither

 

 

 

 

 

 Wither

 

 

 

I feel an ending

traveling through my bones.

It stops for gas

just short of my liver,

looks for some diversion

 

a roadside attraction

 

as it spreads a cloth

under an infested juniper,

making a picnic of fingernails

and rheum, mumbling,

"Damn the bagworms."

How long time seems

 

in this heat-strangled house

carpentered by a coffinmaker sun,

with no appetite for increasing,

no single cell willing

to grow and not die.

 

We gracelessly surrender

 

to the wither

of merciless azure. Even the land,

with its skin drawn taut

as a snake's winding sheet

drying in August's crinkled moult,

 

knows when to quit.

 

The newborn rain comes,

leaves flush and spin;

when this red shambled summer

finds its cold-spangled grave,

 someone will laugh

up a pumpkin-spiced sleeve

 

under feckless wild stars

 

while the goldenrod blooms and my ending

takes a short vacation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Summer's End

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Gas, 1940 ©Edward Hopper      Fair Use

Native Oklahoma Goldenrod, via okprairie on Pinterest  Fair Use

 

 

 

Observed In The Wild

 

 

 

 

Observed In The Wild

 

 

 

 

I found you first in the green evening

a secret burn of elongated lines

sketched into the mural of bending pines

by wind's unseen ink, traveling the trail

on an old scent caught in the bracken;

then the adrenaline snap

of your head my way.

You called me from my campfire

to answer the brown beg in your eye,

to fall beneath you like aspen leaves

at your season's yellow turn,

as my own summer died around me.

Pulled like gut to the crescent bow

of the reckless huntress, I chased you

through evergreen shadow, along bone-clean

clattered rockfall, dry creeks where

only the musk smell of hope drew me on

past the deadfalls and I would guess at your way

by the arrowhead and adder's mouth rising

in your wake. Too many years you ran ahead

to pleasure a dozen others who never

saw your winter,

but often when the itch was unbearable in

the time-crack of April's acid sun, you

came to me in the clearing, to rub the felt

from your horns on my shoulder and moan

my name like a sacrifice

low and heavy as the white bull

of Poseidon knee deep in the

sacred wave before the knife.

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Green Fire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Arrowhead (Sagittaria Latifolia) and the wild orchid known as green adder's mouth(Malaxis unifolia) are common North American wildflowers. Pardon the mixed metaphors of stag and bull which in time-honored fashion I ascribe to poetic license.You can read a quick synopsis of the myth of King Minos, his wife, the white bull sent him by Poseidon, its pursuit by Heracles and its eventual sacrifice by Theseus here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Pine Forest II, 1901, © Gustav Klimt  Public Domain

Head of a Stag, 1634, © Diego Velazquez     Public Domain