Timberline Press, 59 pages, 2001
Out of print.
Selections:
IN HARMONY
This is occupied country.
Aliens have landed
but no one’s listening to the radio.
Water towers are graffiti-stricken Martians
invading on tip-toe.
They spew forth hard water.
We drink and are overwhelmed.
Time soaks our rusting bodies.
The streets are windswept
passages of history.
In low-angled evening light
the storefronts are bright
as the Seven Cities of Cibola.
After school the Dog ‘n Suds
is Normandy Beachhead,
the landing vehicles
filled with newly licensed
sixteen-year-olds.
Memory fails us recalling
only the past.
The retired town planner
wants to speed up traffic.
Get rid of the bottlenecks.
The streets are rerouted.
The black arrows all point
one way. No one comes back.
TO PUT BY
He walks to the back of the house he’s lived in all his life and finds a room that he’s never entered. He opens the door and feels along the wall for the light switch. How strange to work both his palms over something cold, flat, vertical, and in the pitch of darkness, extending to the infinity of corners. For a moment, he’s falling upward, sideways, and down. He secures his feet to the floor and turns. Something long and thin brushes his cheek. He spins from vertigo to fear. Quickly stepping back, he swings his arm to defend himself and his hand tangles in the pull chain. A dusty bulb shrouded in cobwebs ignites, as if a clod of earth were glowing from the low ceiling.
He coughs from the musty odor of things sealed and undisturbed. From floor to ceiling, he is surrounded by shelves. On each shelf he sees old glass canning jars. Thousands of Ball jars crowded into rows and labeled, the hand-lettering faded beyond reading. A surviving “e” here, a “cl” there. He looks for pickles, peas, pears, parsnips. It’s not what he finds. From the top shelf, he pulls down jars packed with cirrus, cumulus, nimbus, stratus clouds, all of them sealed tight. He sees all the faces and animals and the grotesqueries that ever came to him, lying on his back in fields staring up at the passing days: the flocks of sheep, herds of buffalo, legends of Roman soldiers, flotillas, armadas; the islands, archipelagos, continents where he wanted to spend his summers and falls; and the dancing Katchinas, the spirits that surely must be behind it all.
On the lower shelf are jars of wind. There’s the one that softly dissolved him as he sat on the porch one long late afternoon. In the next, the wind that pushed waves into his boat as he crossed a lake, and the gust that caught his kite, breaking the twine, releasing him to blow across a field. The other jars are aswirl with what hasn’t arrived.
There are jars of snowflakes, each classified according to its intricate frozen lattice. There are sunsets packed like colored sand in shot glasses sold in stores along the highway in Tucumcaria and Yuma. Jars of light rain and mists, deluges and floods. Forty days and forty nights of jars. Jars of extinct bird songs, jars of grackle crackle and sparrow twitter, so many he can’t reach, sitting too far back.
He finds the shelf full of his breathing: the very first one that burned his lungs into life, the longest one when he fell from the oak breaking his arm, all of those from the hospital waiting for his father to die, all those inhaling the fragrance of another’s hair, the new jars appearing at that moment to take in the breathing of this room.