November 2018
Note: I am a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. My poems, allegiances, and habits often reflect my affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, my translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant. A new book, Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird, is out from Hoot ‘n Waddle, based in Phoenix.
A Sunday
A thrasher flies out of darkness
trailing a thread of cloud
from its beak. This early
it’s anyone’s world; rabbits
stake a claim to the grass
and the rat
who took what he needs from the night
has returned to his burrow.
The trees toss scraps
of birdsong back
and forth between them. Later,
the wind kicks up, and there’s driving
to and from the downtown, via
underpass and overpass,
with all the usual sightings of the homeless
sleeping through the afternoon
on courthouse steps. There’s some justice
and space for them, it being Sunday
and a day of rest
for discord. Soon enough
it will be Monday and the forecast
is for further arguments
with a black Heaven versus
a white Hell, though for now
the grey areas between them
have turned into sky.
A Day’s Rain
The owl’s voice rubbed against the clouds
last night, and now
it rains a steady rain that washed
away the mountain and chimes as it falls
on the pine and lantana and
pavement all the way
down the street to the hazy turn
where two red rear lights
look back at where they’ve been:
through a long, dry summer
whose light came daily to sand the desert
down to its foundations
and whose darkness was a trail
coyotes followed to drink
from the stillest of still ponds, which can’t
be still today with all
the water flowing through the washes
quick to carry summer off. There go
the devils who fanned
the sun’s flames at noon. It’s the time
of starlings and Purple sage. And raindrops
hang in the melancholy air
while hummingbirds learn
to fly between them.
© 2018 David Chorlton
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