Inkling
an online journal of poetry and prose

04/13/09

 When Clouds Come to Visit

With shaggy needles, the Ponderosas

reach to comb the clouds.

Like a mother sweeping the bangs

 from her daughter’s eyes;

noting the imprints

time has employed:

Parenthesis setting into her cheeks,

from exaggerated laughs

and working in customer service.

Furrows, trained for folding in

against the mid day sun.

And the mother is left to wonder…

Why jokes are funnier in other towns

and why daughters leave

to feel the sun shine on ends of the world—

when it is here.

When here, the great light and heat always shines

and sets the red sky to life.

The geese travel so far, all the way from Canada.

Their feathers tear, and their wings nearly break from the journey,

just to float in the blueness of morning and the amber dusk,

 without the clouds or the cold.

*                  *                  *

The Certainty of Ants

We walked a mile or so,

with the sand and hot gravel

grinding and shifting below our feet,

pulling us, grabbing hold of our heels—

trying to slow us down, to stiffen our legs at their joints

and snap them into place.

And we stopped, and sank into the barren canals

 of the Verde River.

We looked up at the walls of red clay,

stretched twenty feet above our eyes.

If there were thirty of us linked

side by side, we could not bridge the gap. 

Ahead, steam rose from the bend,

or perhaps it was a mirage.

We looked around wondering

which way our feet should turn.

Yet, the ants around our sinking heels

knew with certainty, there would be no great flood,

 when they walked the same mile or so-

sifting through dust and rocks and weeds

in search of a place to build their empire.

*                  *                   *     

It Meant Nothing To Us

The white-sequined rock gardens

catch fire in the desert dawn.

They are prisms, rainbows

or spotlights over the trailer park,

for the morning ritual outside our kitchen window.

We sit in our curlers and socks, watching

and slurping our cereal.

My sister makes a cavalier kazoo sound

while our neighbor makes his wobbly descent

down his green indoor, outdoor carpeted staircase.

His gaze is lost in the sky,

eyes searching for something unknown to us.

He moves as if a string is pulling his withered chin

from the heavens.  In his arms,

he cradles a sharply pressed triangle of white starts

stitched on a navy sea,

stacked on another in black.

With knobby fingers, he unfolds them

and watches them flap wildly in the breeze.

The same way mother lets our poodle yip and

spring about before leashing her for a walk.

He fastens the flags, and raises them to the sky,

bending to a knee, he genuflects

to his tabernacles now snaking in the wind.

His freckled scalp bobs increasingly in speed.

We watch his suspenders widen and narrow with each breath,

until he folds entirely into himself.

We can’t hear, but we imagine he is crying.

My sister points to me with an index finger

and bends her thumb, clicking an invisible trigger

“POW POW.”

I hit the ground with limp legs

and curl my hand to my heart saying, “mama MIA,”

flopping my tongue out of my mouth, and shutting my eyes…

until our mother closes the blinds and tells us that’s enough.