Poems
Techniques of Avalanche Survival
When the white thunder stops and you’re finally curled
in your womb of snow, wiggle your toes.
If there is no pain, flex your fingers, make a fist,
plow a breathing space. This smell -- clean, empty --
must be the scent of the upper atmosphere,
dragged down miles, flake by flake.
Careful. You don’t want to be a second triggering
tremor, setting off another slide; slowly pack your chrysalis.
Though your chamber may be infused with sky-blue light
you won’t be able to tell which way is earth.
Remain calm. Find a small heavy object -- a knife, a watch --
hold it out and let it drop. Its fall will tell you
the direction of the ground. Don’t be surprised if it hits
your chin; your mind has already blacked out those sickening
minutes, your body a loose marionette in the tumble.
When you have your bearings, mole in the opposite direction.
Try not to think about the surface,
smooth now as a low-tide beach at sunrise.
Don’t picture the search party spotting your glove
worming through the glittering crust. Forget
how your presence there, and your entrance,
will be -- as it always has been -- utterly, unimaginably small.
This poem appeared in Willow Springs No. 55.
Anatomy of a Five-Lined Skink
Nose to tip, maybe six inches, three of them azure tail.
It weighs two feathers, a breeze, and some rain:
a sliver of flesh in a blissful calm between wiggles,
ribs like leaf-veins, or thinner, a comb of dog’s whiskers.
Lungs the size of orange seeds. Brain-pebble.
At least that’s what I can see out the window. It scoots
out from the live oak’s shadow, then stops so still it disappears.
Its heart must be humming like a fly’s wing, though,
on its shingle of daylight, exposed to passing birds --
to them it’s not much more than a crunchy worm.
All this so I won’t hear her talking: categorically
replacing each word from her mouth with a word
about a lizard. I’m filing away “space” and “needs”
and “time to figure things out,” making myself hear
“tongue” and “scales” and “hunting bugs in the magnolia.”
And she claims I never listen. How else might I focus so well?
Me and the reptile both, wobbling on a slick bubble of time --
there’s only so much running around a skink can do in sunlight
and live. And still her, talking through it -- tears, chatter,
rustle, birdsong, a passing truck.
This poem appeared in River Styx No. 57.
Surveying With the Jumping Spider
A crumb of dirt, at first glance.
Dark fleck amongst white bird-speck and grill-ash.
Then a headlong twitch forward fifty bug-lengths
in half a blink,
close to my hand in its gigantic
clumsiness, all wrinkle and knuckle.
Then it is on me.
Microscopic furry glove with three extra fingers.
Eye-buttons that shine despite their tininess.
The colors: if black can be vivid, then vivid black,
and white-so-white, unstained antiblack.
I am too large for it to see me.
Existence is a tickle:
spider-feet hooking wrist-hair,
while above me, maples, cables, a distant flashing tower,
and I’ve got my arm around the iron porch-rail.
A puff of breath could change the spider’s life.
Instead I wait for it to flick back to the step.
I can see the curve of the earth no better than it can,
I depend on horizons to predict my storms.
Another second and it has spat down a safety line, jumped
into the still aura, and dangled. It hangs waiting.
I lower slow and it is gone.
I’m different now: briefly lightened by one spider’s spider-weight.
This poem appeared in Poet Lore Vol. 99 Nos. 1/2.
Dinosaur Hall
Crossing the dim threshold from bright Independence
Avenue is like a special effect of time:
I can’t focus immediately, the scene bends and wobbles
as if distorted by heat or reflected in a wind-skimmed pond.
My older body is reverent where it stands,
always smaller in dream and memory --
no matter how far I circle some part of me always
returns here, to breathe Smithsonian air.
To see Diplodocus, that sloping chain
of cervical vertebrae, topped with the peg-toothed
skull, donkey grin angled to strip fern leaves by the ton.
Now it merely gargoyles above the mighty arch of forelimbs,
entrance to the cathedral of its ribs
where once beat a heart so large
a saint might be mummified in its membrane.
The nave rings with piping museum echoes.
Duck-billed hadrosaurs do the Osiris
on the walls above, leviathan hieroglyphs,
forelimbs and necks drawn back in death pose,
skulls gazing forever skyward.
All that’s missing: torches, lightning, a bell-ringer --
instead, the uniformed custodian slips the from the crowd,
dark and blocky as a priest, stepping gingerly
around the wrecked in-situ Stegosaurus, not having to look down.
His duster pokes and flies between the spine’s knobbed chevrons,
spinning delicate feathers like votive flickers.
He works from the head back, another neck
in a permanent crook like a sculptor or ceiling-painter.
One whose devotion makes itself useful,
instead of standing there in the blur of stunned childish awe.
This poem appeared in Carolina Quarterly Vol. 55 No. 2.
O Full of Scorpions
The poison hook stark in the mind,
Its curve like a clean cerebral fold;
A needle pulsing with chemical heat,
Poised on the tip of a beckoning finger;
A single black fang, a venom jet;
The tail of the bold embossed comma
That hangs between the parentheses
Of uncertainty and disaster--
the sinister claw and the dexterous,
open and shut. It’s Lucifer’s teardrop,
Trembling like an embryo; a fine trigger
Itching to puncture. The stylus
That dips briefly into your scarlet ink,
Drawing out a single blot of panic.
Its shape: the lobe that houses the jitters,
That pauses your hands as you thumb open
The mouth of your boot, unable
To illuminate beyond the dark angles
Of your intentions, or what might lurk there.
This poem appeared in Ceriph No. 3.
Midwife
Topsail Beach, North Carolina.
July.
That summer, I was the moonlight:
knee-deep in night-cool surf,
I waited, flashlight glowing
where the waves' crash-hiss
licked up the beach
like a dark tongue.
The babies were hatching,
sixty-six Loggerhead Turtles,
and I was their moonlight.
Tiny, weak, and dazed from birth,
the size of Oreo cookies,
they skittered down the beach
with a determination possessed
only by the newborn,
past onlookers squinting to see them
in the necessary darkness.
No one knows where they
go to grow up;
they disappear into the tide, at night,
not big enough to push through tall sea oats,
and return much later the size of suitcases.
I felt the first one bump my shin,
and at once knew
what possibility feels like;
we had gotten them past the gulls,
the crabs, the ignorant trespassers--
and the dark,
which, with clouds smeared across the moon,
would have driven them to other lights,
over dry dunes, under decks,
into traffic.
As they crowded past me
into the water
and into the beginning and the end
of everything
I felt I could be called
Moon, Midwife, Mother,
God, Other
but these hatchlings had no voices
and never would.
This poem appeared in Petroglyph No. 14.
The Eleven O'Clock Show
Yallingup Sheep Station, Western Australia
To herd the muster of fifty gray sheep--
a stumble-tide that runs and stops and bleats
in forceful monosyllables--
the Kelpie, a cinnamon-colored dog,
leaps on their backs, paws careful,
the way he would cross a shallow rapid
on wet stones: snouting back and forth,
cloud-stepping,
until the hindmost sheep enters the gate.
The grazier assures us that he will never bite,
never bark. All he wants to do
is walk on sheep, he says. Brown dog's been bred this way.
Then the sheep have been funneled
into their orderly row, the shearing shed
a shadowy gape at the end.
The dog dismounts, curls
by the fencepost worn smooth as a river stone,
polished by the fifty thousand woolly bellies
crowding by year after year.
This is a working station, he says. This is how it is.
All we have added is a bench for tourists,
a gift shop, a gravel carpark.
We turn from the fence, from its humming electric wire.
We snap our pictures, bag our trinkets,
climb back aboard the bus in a slow, quiet trickle,
never discussing what we might have been bred to want.
This poem appeared in Ceriph No. 3.
Turkey Buzzard
Spiraling like a tattered leaf
caught a steel drain’s vortex,
the sky crystalline, the bird’s slim neck
puppeting that raw, scabby head,
feathers splayed like ragged fingers.
There is a shabbiness about this grim angel
wobbling on the blue breeze, centered
on the rabbit or raccoon dead
in the fallow bean-field. If there was anyone
around to see, it might be maddening,
its lazy, deliberate orbit never seeming
to converge. But in this late afternoon
there is no reason to hurry. Soon enough
the angel will light, hunch, shoulder through grasses.
Without a call or cry it will scissor the black meat,
whole head suffocating in its task.
Then in a flap like a winding sheet
it will rise in a hazy whoosh of decay.
The bird descends like nightfall, like stillness.
How quiet this little field, how un-heard.
This poem appeared in Poet Lore Vol. 99 Nos. 1/2.
Stag Beetle
I was eight years old, and on a bright day
twenty yards from the calcareous seawall
on the Chesapeake, among mint green
lichen and spiky husks of gum tree balls,
he waited for me with his proud antlers,
polished coffee brown carapace
real and big as a toy
that might snip off a finger.
Presented on a pedestal stump, crusted
with stale fungus and flagellate mosses
that wiggled in a miniature wind.
Books said adult males were harmless
despite their fearsome appearance,
so I found a box big enough for a
rabbit or puppy matted the inside
with hastily pulled blades, filled a dish
with water and placed him inside.
All afternoon I listened to his hook feet scraping
on the cardboard and his too-big head
tapping into a corner again and again.
The strange part is that my clearest
memory of the stag beetle
might be a dream: that night, curled
in my grandmother’s guest bed, I sat up
quick and hot by the ember of nightlight
and saw the beetle perched on the
edge of his box, not moving.
Big weak mandibles forked
like arms, lightning rods,
like penitence or accusation,
watching me,
tuned to my rodent breathing,
and the room seemed small
the carpet thin and the pillow
a barnacled stone.
This poem appeared in Petroglyph No. 14.