To the Catcher

Heartlands: dedicated to the people of Moore, OK

I was raised on a mud bank river
where every spring the levee broke
and the crying chickens ran.
Where summers licked at your pores;
thirsty air sipping away at you,
smacking its lips from the honey heat.
Sweet grain rose in potent plumes like some sunny valley fermenting grapes.
Fresh cut hay all tangled in her bales sung a song of soft earth and musky men:
And the horses grew anxious with their molting backs while the moss retreated to deeper living.
Long sad ears hung themselves until their green eyes popped gold
and corn was born.
Every afternoon the earth slows down to talk with the sun a little longer giving the horizon an encore.
Winters were never predictable
and every man in bibs could tell you how to watch your flower bulbs to know the next season’s frost line.
“Follow them deeper and you’ll be the one in spring’s view.”
Wild oaks with heavy cause feeding their leathery seeds to the barking squirrel.
The heat of summer had a sound from daybreak; the screaming of the desperate cicadas.
Intensifying with the hot throat of the summer’s language, always some raspy southern draw calling out for a taste of water.
Oh and the water,
it came with deliverance!
Newly formed clouds hung so grey and heavy you’d think all the sky could bear stone, freshly filtered by the cobbled summits of mountains far west.
Obese splats coming down and sinking,
pooling up sometimes in puddles
giving the dust of red rock roads a chance to swim.
Or the thickness of humidity before a storm. When the greens in things are turned up to
some chartreuse and the stillness in trees begs a single bird to ask if he could make it home?
My home was sandstone basement and a coal shoot.
Thin glass windows that grew heavy and ashamed, warping and bubbling while they raddled in their panes.
And the sky was a meeting place, where you and miles
could dare an adventure on the other. A place so big and open nothing really lived anywhere else, the world was big enough.
Easy to believe God could be harbored up there in the endless view.
The life in the heartland is strict on you.
Nature is never really satisfied with her seasonal backdrops, so she tweaks them constantly and it was never uncommon to wear denim shorts and a flannel coat in May.
And when the streets got heavy with rain and the world
in the endless valley hushed.
Trees suddenly stood guard, like some testament to the unnamed soldier, and the breeze died.
When the chorus of a storm withheld its voice and only lightly began tuning its heavy throats for war, that’s when the sky grew ill.
Grey mounds of shields billowed in and drank some ancient absinthe, and the sky, drunk with anger,
would spin green.
In its fury a black stampede would rally, breath from hollowed snouts gathering until a heaving
so loud
would collapse the softness of clouds and a funnel would appear.
First, eloquently, like some soft woman dipping her pink toe
in a bath too warm,
easing itself down by inches and breathing out in huffs to dull the impact.
The wild littered air, starving,
would eat.
Leaving the spilt grace of silence
in her angered path.
My home, the great gold valley, with its precarious wild beasts.
My home was never comfortable.
My home in the heart of my nation. Where torn flags flew from survival of storms.
My home will stand, in the mud slick rivers
and the full mouthed language.
In the chipping white chapels and the fever sun.
In the ruins of thunder-born tornados, and in the heart of the still beating child inside me.
My home of the heartland.

Knife

Wandering in a wood
I keep nothing.

A knife born from
Grandfather’s blade
that stood stiff
from grainy clots of a
northern French beach.

Smoothed with use
It’s handle,
some resin hue,
freedom oil from
the hands of things
soaked into its
grinning grain.

The knife is a
companion
with well kept secrets.
They have never
been revealed,
the short flash
from light casts
a blip of a smile.

And I wander in a wood
keeping nothing.

Heart of Pom

I do not mind the act of hacking an apple, its crisp snap, consistent flesh.
Nor do I loath over the tough, porous skin being drawn away from the zygote-like surface of an orange.

Capillaries run white, clenching.

But the dismemberment of a pomegranate is a murderous one.
I can’t help but feel a slight morbidity while lancing into the heart. Withdrawing my knife, a bloodline soiled and so begins the massacre.

Without precision, scoring the ovarian walls; plucking life from the ventricles. All the while it bleeding.

Sprays of red mist my face and I am surprised to see my hand expressing a fist, adapting to the resistant tissue.

To take this heart from its tree, it’s lifeline to my hands. To hold its weight with entirety. To score into its flesh and see it react.

We are two living creatures. We each embody the essence of life, harboring tiny morsels that lace trails of ourselves inside them, maps of what could be.

Holding the heart of the pomegranate, dissecting it, ravaging it, stealing its life with fragrant withdraws.
Blood on my hands. It’s tattered carcass in ruins, now flimsy and weak. Tossed to the soil to begin again and I smile a red grin.

Where We’ll Go

Because when we walk
on thinning trails
that the maiden hair ferns claim
we are in awe
at the merriment
of our four eyes
seeing the same.
Green on green
and vines that marry
you and I, one trail too wary.
Because in time we will be these
filigree trillium and
wild huckleberry trees.

Loved Once

If I told you
in riddles
how I’ve loved
before
then I’ve lied
twice:
Now
and twice more.
Because we’ve met
a hundred times
and vaguely through
glass doors.
Yes I’ve loved once,
but you
a hundred times
more.

Saying Never

If you did not know me
I would never know this,
that at a beat of my heart
a day can pass
and you are what I’ve seen.
That without your touch
I’m mad
and I dive forward
without complexities.
That there is a longing
in me that needs you.
That once knowing your name,
I was never going
to be the same. I want you.
And the knowing of
our distance relates novels to me.
You are drawn away.
These arms will never know you.
My lips will never chart you.
The paces we mark
on our daily maps will never cross. But, steadily,
you remain in
my heart
with a brilliant dulling hum.
Beckoning to be remembered.

Your Hair

Your sink-water hair
holds memories
between the dark
spaces of your
lacing braids.
Like some woven
tapestry of
ancient threads.
Lying too much
in the day
and forgetting its
colored name,
your tresses fade
from thirsty wheat to
some thrush’s home.
Where you’ve weaved
your mane
I remember.
Beneath the wooden clock
built from burls of redwood,
dead and always waiting,
sitting in your
thinnest dress.
Tangling in threes
the freedom of your hair
and knitting in the night’s air.
So that morning
still loved the spaces
of night
laced in shallow
plaits,
some feral nest
thick with life.

Summer Heat’s Fantasy

Autumn was your lover’s name
Winter Moon.
And when Spring
skipped by with her
heavily dripping bells
your cheeks blushed roses;
yet you kept your powdered face
shy:
Oh, for that long harvest.
What of me then, the Summer’s Heat,
Winter Moon?
On my endless evenings
steeping your air with warm earth and bronzy myrrh.
Inked wind stretching
its back against
the silken white pucker of jasmine.
The balmy vanilla
scent dowsing each passerby
in royal whiffs of
ancient night fires
and some ripe wildness
that can only be claimed
as sweating euphoria.
Scent lusty enough
to tempt with tincture.
Winter Moon
you are so far away.
Silent white summer dresses
held up over wheaten bales by a thread.
Do I have your attention?
Cotton stars
that fell
and balance on their
brittle pedestals miles from home.
Rolling on, all these pastures
of heavy twill
like the golden youth of
fawns, thick grain fur spotted
to be seen as the earth is
in stillness.
Am I not your lover’s sense?
Does Autumn’s sweet wood and apple mornings
own you more
with her nakedness?
I presume I cannot compete.
My green-envied modesty stealing the show from all the burning oils of thick thighs beneath.
We are bound to never meet.
Pulling at the jaws
of things to
say your name correctly
I trained the moon-jeweled
eyes of the
wolf to cry to you.
In your winter,
their breathy song,
gathering in bellows,
a veil of pearls drawn up
to vapor.
Their dense ruffs of crescent
grey frame the season of
your three-dog-nights.
For me, polished agates,
gems you offered to
me over every equinox-themed cotillion.
Where I, in stung summer skin,
would lean toward you
and then away.
In our void of empty places
only one star between us.
Only Autumn’s decay.