Deja Vu

The pears have ripened.

They are firm as idols.

Every branch makes obeisance

To its fruit. A light wind

Holds the gold flesh in its fingers.

The stems neither glue themselves

Fiercely nor do they break at touch.

Their adhesion is now perfect.

The time of this phenomenon is brief

Next week will see

Windfall rivers in mottled light.

The pure scent of pears

Like fairest flesh, like clearest water,

Suffused with the antique odor

Of love beginning to bruise.

We walk through the pear orchard.

Summer is almost over.

The nights are cooler.

The trees shudder with golden tears

As if a goddess in the root

Whispered of waste and winter.

An oracle

Mists along the distant river.

Its truths go up in smoke.

We have been here.

We have been here.

Windless Orchard

Bears

Hiking

in the Beartooth range

we fasten bells to our packs.

Tattered lodgepole pines

betray a bear's territory.

We sing loudly. We look for fresh sign.

Later, picking blueberries,

a figure in a shaggy black coat

angles into my vision.

It is not a portly man

as I, for a split-second, thought.

The dog heckles it off.

Bears. The gypsies

taught them to dance

on a bed of hot coals.

The bearleader

striding into a village. The bear

with a ring in its nose.

Jugglers and musicians,

women in gaudy skirts

and gold bangles sweeping through the dust.

The bear jigging its mockery of joy

while tambourines shake and coins shower.

Bears.

They swagger into campsites

looking for coolers.

Their little pigeyes

red and vicious. They

swing their snouts

savoringly over garbage.

Thirteen people have been killed

by grizzlies in Glacier

in the last decade. Mostly

they were asleep in down bags

or making love. The mutilated women

were menstruating--this could be a factor.

Smell of blood. Smell of sexual

activity.

The killer bears

traditionally sows with cubs

or old crippled males

are getting younger and bolder.

One theory: cubs who observe their mother

driving off humans, will imitate her behavior.

A full-grown grizzly

can break a moose spine with one blow.

Separate a man's face from his skull

easy as filleting a trout,

drag a screaming woman

through the woods for miles.

A child wakes up screaming.

All he can tell you is bears

bears. He is beyond comfort.

At last his whimper

ebbs., he snuggles into his pillow,

the light goes off, the door closes,

he sleeps

hugging the bear to his heart.

Bears. In the old stories

their skins fell off.

A prince stood silhouetted against the fire

with the spell lifting. All it took was love.

Tomorrow

How I Came to Write This Poem

First, set pieces

Clever as zircons,

Then weather,

A sky of cawing birds

And roiling clouds, my

Metaphor or badlands

Deceivingly pink and gold in dawnlight.

It is the angle of sun

Which captivates,

The molten canyon driving west

At sunset. The pearly morning

Centered with a redbird

Uttering his distinctive query

From the low bush beyond the south window.

The rimrocks hovering like

Ogre nursemaids

Massive, flat-topped

While the town below darkens

And sparkles.

A leaf is an anthem

Everything stands for something,

We paddle still waters

Making a silver groove

From which our existence

Like waterbirds perpetually slides forward.

A ring of firs. Black rock.

And always

The dream of white-eyed horses.

When you died, the voices chorused

Like migrating redwings

Filling the bare March trees

With amazing noise, then silence.

I could not open your book,

Examine the photograph or look

At the slanted signature

Of your love. I could not

Feel.

Poetry repulsed me,

Its bleeding scab. Streaking windows

Of rain. Gravel embedded

In mudslick. Why

Write or sing or draw or think,

As Auden said it changes

Nothing.

Last spring the rivers rose

Out of their banks in a hundred-year flood.

A terrified boy was swept away

As the news cameras followed. Men

Lowered ropes, attempting to grasp

An extremity as he boiled past

In the deluge crying out.

This boy, a stranger, breaks

My heart. I wept for him

As I never could for you or myself.

Today, the poem says

I will be spoken the way buds clench

Then burst in the false precursor flower.

The true leaf unfurls its nature

Its delicate ribs, fabric tough

And strange, greenskinned,

Thinskinned, willing to suffer

Loss with the wind. All over earth

Turning to powder, the least of us

Essential and here and now.

Barrellhouse

THE COMING OF BLINDNESS

                                                                                    People become faces, the

                                                                                    Books had no illustrations,

                                                                                    I couldn’t see myself in the

                                                                                    Looking glass.

                                                                                                Jorge Luis Borges

Like blindness, losing each other was gradual

The petals of the white lilacs

Fell softly, vanished

And you held me at arms length

Like newsprint.

The streetlights wore haloes

Of martyrs.

There was a blankness

In the center of making love.

I no longer

Believed our bodies could

Solve equations of loss. We disengaged

To argue over coffee.

Every remark led

To a stupid argument the way

Failing sight makes a man

Stumble over thresholds.

If we had learned Braille,

The language of feeling,

Would anything be different?

Borges says black and red

Are the first colors to be dismissed,

Colors of drama, passion,

Deadly games of challenge.

The blind live

In a luminous greenish mist,

A sort of confusion and grief,

Like this, like this.

Interim

1943

Moon helmets and webbed belts,

Voices in the basement.

Black shutters close over our windows.

In the picture book

A collie dog is helping a soldier.

My cousins in fat white boots

Twirling batons up the street, behind them

A brass clamour of trombones and cornets.

Names on a white stone

Women in black coats stand

Hands hanging from their sleeves.

The auditorium. Flag and a cross. Jesus arching

Like an alley cat. Loud song.

God Bless America. Dark giant of voices.

I too am singing.

I break all my crayolas, sullen, won’t

Be sorry. Fat white moon

Of Sister’s face shining into mine. So:

Those hollow shadows are eyebrows!

Black, arched as heaven, as suffering Jesus,

As planes heavy with bombs

As the slant eyes

Of evil yellow pilots, the demented cross

Of a swastika. I like

Smilin’ Jack and Daddy Warbucks.

The black cocker spaniel I might get

Next year when I am five

Like the one on my mother’s playing cards

Queen of Hearts, King of Diamonds. Not the Jack

With shifty eyes, grownup voices lowering

Then forgetting, saying Kamikazi, death

Mother crying into the telephone,

Aunt heaving up the stairs, her breath

Black wheezes. Someone hands me

A rosary. Round black beads.

Gold cross hanging.

Patsy Boy

White sailor suit wrinkling the sunlight

How he would throw me

Into the air, frock and hairbows flying

Poetry

Journalism 101

WHO

Who spots the golden eye of the lynx
Or the mushroom nestled in the oak root.
Who posits the dictum I am, therefore I think
In a reverse Descartes, a sort of brute
Ideology mastering the animate nation.

Who envisions the way the lake
Ripples in the forenoon like a shed skin.
Who first praised the rattlesnake’s
Divinity, the way it can move in
And out of itself, a self creation.

Who took the maiden’s hand,
Who led her to the sacred well
Where bones bleached into a command
For rain that, for ages, never fell.
Who celebrated then, with what elation.


WHAT

What translates the language of the rain
On rooftops on a Tuesday morning.
What calculates the images of fame
Or billows with cumulonimbus warning
Like storms clenching right at the horizon.

What mimics the footfalls of the small
Creatures or the hoofbeats of the horses.
What can we learn from the terrible
Patterns of the wind or watercourses
Braiding to a portentous liaison.

What happens when the curtains start to sway
What luminosity can be affected
In a moment that’s an hour, then a day
So everything we knew is indirected
And diffuse, a kind of gauzy prison.



WHERE

Where did the footprints lead
Where was the forest path we sought
In the painting by Renoir. The seed
Of philosophy is withering and fraught
With bad desires, a pond of algae.

Where else can the storied gold be hid
Sacred mountains and rainbows are a child’s
Fantasy—a kettle with no lid
Where everything boils, tame and wild
A deafened ear, a defective eye.

Where is the church of the possible
The anteroom where everyone kneels
The voices raised in a spurious gospel
Where the statues bless and the bell peels
And the sacrament is merely a sigh


WHY

Why even ask this question
Or any question, answers are like mist
Over a river or the incessant
Reasons behind the Judas kiss.
Why betray ourselves or each other.

Why double back when the path is clear
Why second guess every second thought.
The wood is dark, the fox the deer
In silent bowers. Why calculate the cost
Of love, its aptitude to smother.

Why examine the nuance of each sentence
The breakbone evidence of plow on clod.
Why save a talisman for remembrance
Or speculate on if there is a god
How that could impact any lover.



WHEN

When all the barns have collapsed
When windfall apples rot in a gorge of bees
When hollow trees creak in every synapse
Of weather and splitting let the fence wires seize
The edges of the unoccupied pastures.

When fields rise up again in native grasses
And cultivation is an aborted birth
When buffalo emerge from mountain passes
Like ghostly dreams drummed out of the earth
Invisibly, spirits of vanquished textures

When rain falls constantly or not at all
When fires consume the prairies and the slopes
Of foothills where witchlike figures in a caul
Of ash stand like emblems of our various hopes
Making jagged vaguely obscene gestures.

When dark or light is now or never
And you and I are gone forever.

THE LUNAR YEAR

Hunger Moon

That’s when the food ran out. The stock

Depleted even the saved potatoes gone

Rotten at the eyes. Our savings cleft

By half, all love foreclosed, the doors

Of home padlocked, the windows boarded.

What else can happen? Weather broods

Over the bleak horizon. This moon is also known

As the snow moon.

Crow Moon

The raven invented the world, now the crow rules

Its lesser partitions. It encompasses

The slyness of politicians, the ruthlessness of love.

It waits for things to die or else it torments

Songbirds, those who can tongue

A harmony every crow despises.

Egg Moon

The lost wax process creates an egg

Of gorgeous dimensions, Byzantine

Geometrics suggesting a rage of contained

Passion. But another egg is pure.

Cool in the palm and distant

As that place where everything begins.

Milk Moon

It is this specialization that defines us.

How we link to every creature

That nurses its young. That

Baptismal drink the Orient refuses

After a certain age. What sort of wisdom

Clinks bottles on a stoop at dawn

Like earliest, beloved memories.

Strawberry Moon

You find them knitting the pasture

With rubies, the wild sort

Whose sweetness is so compact, so perfect

That cultivation seems a sort of sin

Original as the path that led us out

Of infancy to the bloody-hearted world

Wearing its seeds like a cloak.

Thunder Moon

Everything here depends on nitrogen

Of which thunder is merely the voice

As a slap is the sound of forked anger,

The sound angels made as they fell

Into the firmament, the first denial.

Sturgeon Moon

Producers of caviar and isinglass

One richly edible, the other a bonding agent

Like the lust that glues two lovers.

Flesh of temperate waters. The miracle

That feeds a jubilation

Of disbelievers. Cast your net. Have patience.

Barley Moon

All grains were once wild

Uncultivated, there for the reaping

There for the first lively spirits

Fermenting like every wish into

Something achievable, the malt

Of high ambition.

Harvest Moon

Every goddess walks

Under that parasol, her arms

A cornucopia of fulfillment.

No wonder we worship this

Unblemished guise. No wonder

We think no matter how many banks

Fail, how many ships break into pieces

In the coming gales, we’ll still

Have this: how we were blessed

Just as the good times ended.

Hunters Moon

That’s what we do when everything

We counted on has collapsed

And all coffers are empty, all drawers

Divested of silk, all trigger fingers

Reinvested with darkness. Walk

Silently in the tracks of the dispossessed

Ensuring it will not be you.

Cold Moon

Hunker down. Survival is now the key

To your heart, the tone-deaf song.

If you make a fire it is certain

To go out while you’re asleep

You’ll wake with your feet frozen

In a crossroad of bad choices.

Shaking is the way your body

Fights cold like this. Huddle together.

Wolf Moon

They have come back, those predators

Of the prairie, the steppe, the open range.

Protected as a parliament

Of oligarchs. Their guard hairs rising

As they sight you, out there

In your unarmed villages.

North American Review

Poetry magazine well-versed in criticism

Poetry magazine well-versed in criticism

Artists of Exactitude

ARTISTS OF EXACTITUDE: AUDUBON AND STUBBS

The bird that Audubon depicted

With such scrutiny was compelled to fly

Into the static existence of the portfolio.

Stunned out of the bayou,

Each feather a perfection of detail.

Its inanimate spirit a paradox.

The horse that Stubbs bled dry

Pumped full of tallow to investigate

Its arterial and venous expressways,

Strung up on hooks and skinned

Exposing the armature of muscle and bone

Exact as chilled rage defenestrated

Upon the page of science and art.

Obermeisters of observation

Threading the needle of particulars—

Why foil the imagination with diffuse mists

Of oriental peaks or pointillist

Picknickers or watercolored wetlands.

These two seized

The heart of passion, that bloody industry.

To get it right, the object

Has to die

So we can see its

Utterness, its suspended miracle.

Rockhurst Review

Rose Red to Snow White

A dark wind batters the door,
our minds unchink as
the chimney roars and the eaves
shriek in their rusty dreams.

Huddle by the fire, sister,
something is snapping in the applewood
and sparks ignite our nightgowns.
let us save each other.
Let us marry these ashes.

Don't leave the comfort we've found
for that rap on the doorjamb.
God knows who'd be out
on such a night in a blizzard
like this one. Have no pity
on travelers far from town
in this fierce weather.

But you've unlatched us,
let a whirlwind of white flakes
confuse our destinies
and succored a brute of fur
whose snout embeds
in your fabulous hair.

A thorn stabs
my red heart
as you lie down
with the great bear
bringing him to life
with your white body.

How can you be sure
he'll turn at last into something
noble, that he won't always
raid your breasts for honey
or sleep grunting all winter?

Wisconsin Review. Collected in The Lonely Hearts Killers by Joan Colby. Spoon River Poetry Press. Also anthologized in Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairytale Poetry.

White Lilacs

The white lilac has a hundred ghostly fingers.
It points at the first stars.
It points at me
standing in a May twilight
with barbed wire hooking the darkness where
barbs of stars bloom astonishingly.
The cones of the white lilac
shake in a dark wind from the south.
Fragrance rattles
into air, odor of sweet
bones, night-mouths.

All night the lilacs will shudder here
at the edge of the meadow while
stars dazzle the sky's bush.
That black bush of menace.

A ghost
walks over my grave as my flesh rises.
The roots of the lilacs
strive through my skull discovering the holes
I gaze out of. Existence
is terrible. The white lilacs
tremble as I tremble
departing into themselves,
into their clusters of oneness,
refusing to be a symbol,
admitting nothing.

from Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve by Joan Colby
Alembic Press

A HEARTBREAK IS A SIMPLE FRACTURE

Nothing ever heals without a mark

The bone thickens

Over the hairline crack

And the skin bunches itself

Like a garment secured with a safety pin

Over the site of a wound.

Fire leaves its red blaze

On the wilderness of the body,

You follow those signs to pain

That ancient thickening

Whose memory makes you wince

Like a scar bereft of sensation

But hideous to look at.

It’s said when a fracture mends

The broken place is stronger

Than ever before. But remember

The stiffening, the inevitable loss

Of flexion,

Small deformities located only

By feeling.

You might seem whole as a vase

Carefully cemented by an expert

In the repair of

Rare vessels

Yet the weather will compound

Old injuries

Auditioning in each sprain

Or broken femur

Whistling along the nerve

Like a northerly.

Examine the eye transfixed

By awful visions.

The lover vanishing down the stairs

For the last time,

The child disappearing

In deep water,

A building on fire with every window

Orange as a marigold

Blooming with screams.

Examine lips

How they blossom with small roses,

How the thorns of language fall

From them like hooks,

How they open dark and sudden

Like the crevice

In which eels lurk

Vicious as tongues.

Examine the heart

How it is pierced with an arrow

In all the depictions of love.

It is a prisoner

In a jail of bone knowing

It can never escape alive.

You can die of

Its breaking. You can die of the callus

That forms when there is no response

To its assiduous knocking

the new renaissance

Crazy Rain

Twilight.
The dull insanity of rain.

Your mother is telling ghost stories
to the wind. Her words are lost
like indulgences that caused the great split of faith.
You remember for the first time in years
the act of contrition you repeated like a charm
before sleeping. You were a child then
with nothing to be sorry for. The rain
taps the glass, its black fingers
burgling your dreams. It is the stranger
at the door asking directions.
You shoot the bolt. Trust was the first thing
you were missing. Then love saying its name
against the crack in the window.
But it sounded wrong. It sounded
like a scheme. Someone was trying to get in.
You nailed the boards
over those openings. Only the rain
swiveled through the fish-scale roof
taking the way
of least resistance. Now it draws
a silhouette of loss on the ceiling
over your bed. Those four posts,
the evangelists. You slept in their
care under the guardian wings
of angels plucked
for your comforter.

You're no child any longer.
The child you were
cringes from this sentence and grows small
as a comma.
Each impersonation of the mirror
frightens you. The bone and ash
of your ancestors. The name you sign.
The ghost
in your head who suddenly remembers.

The rain is unfeeling. It pits the earth.
The earth is unfeeling too.
What are you doing here
expecting to be loved.

It rains, it rains
like crazy.

from Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve by Joan Colby
Alembic Press