mind is sick tonight.
Prosser
In winter two kinds of fields on the hills
outside Prosser: fields of new green wheat, the slips
rising overnight out of the plowed ground,
and waiting,
and then rising again, and budding.
Geese love this green wheat.
I ate some of it once too, to see.
And wheat stubble-fields that reach to the river.
These are the fields that have lost everything.
At night they try to recall their youth,
but their breathing is slow and irregular as
their life sinks into dark furrows.
Geese love this shattered wheat also.
They will die for it.
But everything is forgotten, nearly everything,
and sooner rather than later, please God —
fathers, friends, they pass
into your life and out again, a few women stay
a while, then go, and the fields
turn their backs, disappear in rain.
Everything goes, but Prosser.
Those nights driving back through miles of wheat fields —
headlamps raking the fields on the curves —
Prosser, that town, shining as we break over hills,
heater rattling, tired through to bone,
the smell of gunpowder on our fingers still:
I can barely see him, my father, squinting
through the windshield of that cab, saying, Prosser.
At Night the Salmon Move
At night the salmon move
out from the river and into town.
They avoid places with names
like Foster’s Freeze, A & W, Smiley’s,
but swim close to the tract
homes on Wright Avenue where sometimes
in the early morning hours
you can hear them trying doorknobs
or bumping against Cable TV lines.
We wait up for them.
We leave our back windows open
and call out when we hear a splash.
Mornings are a disappointment.
With a Telescope Rod on Cowiche Creek
Here my assurance drops away. I lose
all direction. Gray Lady
onto moving waters. My thoughts
stir like ruffed grouse
in the clearing across the creek.
Suddenly, as at a signal, the birds
pass silently back into pine trees.
Poem for Dr Pratt, a Lady Pathologist
•
Last night I dreamt a priest came to me
holding in his hands white bones,
white bones in his white hands.
He was gentle,
not like Father McCormick with his webbed fingers.
I was not frightened.
•
This afternoon the maids come with their mops
and disinfectant. They pretend I’m not
there, talk of menstrual cycles as they
push my bed this way and that. Before leaving,
they embrace. Gradually, the room
fills with leaves. I am afraid.
•
The window is open. Sunlight.
Across the room a bed creaks, creaks
under the weight of lovemaking.
The man clears his throat. Outside,
I hear sprinklers. I begin to void.
A green desk floats by the window.
•
My heart lies on the table, a parody
of affection, while her fingers rummage
the endless string of entrails.
These considerations aside,
after all those years of adventure in the Far East,
I am in love with these hands, but
I’m cold beyond imagining.
Wes Hardin: From a Photograph
Turning through a collection
of old photographs
I come to a picture of the outlaw,
Wes Hardin, dead.
He is a big, moustached man
in a black suitcoat
on his back over a boardfloor
in Amarillo, Texas.
His head is turned at the camera
and his face
seems bruised, the hair
jarred loose.
A bullet has entered his skull
from behind
coming out a little hole
over his right eye.
Nothing so funny about that
but three shabby men
in overalls stand grinning
a few feet away.
They are all holding rifles
and that one
at the end has on what must be
the outlaw’s hat.
Several other bullets are dotted
here and there
under the fancy white shirt
the deceased is wearing
— in a manner of speaking —
but what makes me stare
is this large dark bullethole
through the slender, delicate-looking
right hand.
Marriage
In our cabin we
Jamie Duncan, Holly Scott - (ebook by Undead)