David Chorlton Verse-Virtual 2016 May

May 2016

I have lived in Phoenix since 1978 when I moved from Vienna, Austria. Born in Austria, I grew up in Manchester, close to rain and the northern English industrial zone. In my early 20s I went to live in Vienna and from there enjoyed many trips around Europe, often as an artist working in watercolor. My poems have appeared in Slipstream, Skidrow Penthouse, and Poem, among others, and my Selected Poems appeared in 2014 from FutureCycle Press.

Lyric Botany

The namers of flowers stoop to question
washes, and scratch the gravel
for a clue. They are linguists
without portfolio in landscapes that change color
before their eyes. Before they come,
notebook in hand
with a glass to magnify each bloom,

the deer vetch is anonymous,
trumpet flower is silent,
and shindagger is yellow smoke rising
from rocks in May. Their work
is to cross-breed language

so that beavertail lives in earth
as it does in water,
plant alliteration
or roadsides with the brittlebush,
and experiment with consonants
until fleabane and madrone grow
from the alphabet's old loam.
Their skill is in the mixing

of telegraph with plant
or snake with weed
and in imagining
that a bear can be grass in the desert

so that we may reel
with intoxicating sounds
as the moths who drink nectar
hallucinate when they have drunk from the datura
ordained in speech as sacred

(first appeared in POEM)

On a Line from Rolf Jacobsen
The twilight is where our life is.

An otherworldly rose
soaks into the walls
of houses that appeared
so ordinary all day

and glass buildings shine
as they would at the last
apocalyptic hour
when horsemen ride

like never before
past exhausted traffic
at the cosmic traffic light
once believed to be the sun.

Nyctophobia
The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear.
-Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

After the sun has fallen
nothing distant exists
and sounds that were close
become closer. Listen:

even the mechanical night
is a low hum
along the freeways, broken
by emergencies,
spinning lights
and insomnia running out
of control. The known

slips away. This is coyote time,
scorpion time, the time
the living ground
breaks open. In the hours
of no light
a fox runs by

and an owl waits patiently
to open darkness
with a claw. Little bats cut starlight
into shreds
when they fly as though escaping

through an eye
that never closes, emerging
from a mind too afraid
of itself
to ever fall asleep.