Tag Archives: poem

Sagebrush Kings

The sagebrush kings
with bony crowns
patrol the mountainside,
pacing well-worn paths
and pausing periodically to watch.
Ears high,
eyes straining,
nostrils wide,
they keep their silent vigil.
A sound,
a movement,
an unfamiliar smell
is an invitation to a war
that they can never win.
A huff calls the retreat
into their scrub oak strongholds
where they’ve ruled
for countless seasons
and forged their gaudy diadems
on an anvil made of caution.

Conquered Mountains

There’s clarity that comes with height
when we pace the top of the world
where only the wind
and the deer live.
We place ourselves above civilization,
which looks both physically better 
and fundamentally worse
the farther away you move from it.
The tar-filed cracks in broken pavement,
the gray, oppressive clouds of smog,
the constant noise of our machines
fade as you climb until
the world is laid out before you 
in distant, unobtainable perfection,
and it’s hard to know why
no one else down there can see 
with perfect clarity 
the obvious solutions we have found
to humanity’s most persistent demons 
when we’ve climbed and conquered mountains. 

Sailing

I love falling asleep with the windows open
when it’s warm outside and the breeze
is playing with the leaves.
It stirs the grass, the blinds,
the chimes we bought in Nassau,
and my mind. It carries a scent as it sighs
through the trees and into my room—
a green scent that never sleeps,
but tumbles, ageless, from one tree to another,
from one town to another, from one end of the earth
to the other. It cannot be seen,
and so engages only my other senses:
smell and sound and something
deeper, something primeval,
like the force that drives migrations.
It calls me like the ocean calls a mariner.
I lay in bed and wonder where the breeze began,
where it goes, and what it does in between.
But then I remember;
I already know what it does in between.
It stirs the leaves, the grass, the chimes—
imbues them with its scent and is, in turn, imbued.
It stirs me as I lay in bed,
and, slowly, I drift away with it.

This discount computer

almost stolen for the price,

was purchased on Black Friday.

It only came in Walmart blue,

and the keyboard didn’t work at first.

It trudges along with too-little RAM

and only runs my word processor and internet,

but that’s really all I’ve used it for.

On it’s (replaced) keyboard I have typed

a million discount characters

in poetry and school reports

and earned an associate’s in writing

that’s worth less than my slow computer

to everyone but me. 

Self Portrait as a Mountain Creek

Lazily sometimes,

Murmuring, trickling as I go,

and fierce at others –

a deluge of unprecedented force

that envelops trees and

tears them down in a surging

torrent of muddy water filled 

with broken rocks and blood

and the caracases of animals that ran,

fueled by fear till their lives were spent

and they collapsed, breathless before me,

kneeling, panting, watching, waiting for death, 

pleading, dying, breaking apart, becoming the surge, 

the wave, the flood –

that will go on bubbling slowly 

down toward that peaceful ocean

where all streams rage on the shores of the living.

Self Portrait as a Caterpillar 

They tell me I will fly one day, 

that I have to be patient 

and that my time will come. 

I try to tell myself  they’re right and

eat my weight in whatever

they give me each day

systematically and in spirals,

one bite at a time, endlessly. 

It doesn’t always sit right, 

and I get tired of the taste of milkweed, but

they tell me I will fly one day

if  only I keep eating.