FOUR POEMS

(Calling the Crow, a chapbook of my poems, was published by Waldron Island's Brooding Heron Press in March 1998. A list of individually published poems can be found in my résumé.)

TALKING IN THE WILD

A creek smelling of sulfur slopes its way down the ravine,
fast and small as if a drinking fountain had overflowed
and the water keeps on running. Watercress grows

in this clear brown rush. It ripples in rice-paddy green swatches
brilliant even in December. I have seen
families carry baskets to the muddy borders

of the stream and wrench up
fistfuls of cress by the yard. It harvests like nothing
so much as nets of delicate underwater weed

you'll never hope to see, the dripping of it, intricacies
of many roots needing a good rinse making it seem full
of promise. Water drains from the baskets

and the people are talking low, even the children. It is done
quickly, then the cooking-out of coliform at home,
the boiling of it down to the nearly nothing it must come to

for a broth with bite in it, a slight buzz
for the mouth, the noisy pullulating water it came from
still in the warm room, part of the conversation.

(appeared in Poetry Northwest, 1992)

INCIDENT

I'm running in the park, in the rain,
and a woman drives a tractor trailing a mowing machine
across my path. I stop just short
of the trailer, and the toe of my running shoe catches
on a hummock and I can see myself falling
into the clanking blades. The woman in the cab
wears protective devices over her ears
and is looking down to adjust a dial. She wouldn't
notice someone falling, the efficient
machinery taking me into itself. No pain, only
icy strokes as of many sharpened pencils
drawn along the body.

In the park, a woman drives a tractor trailing a mowing machine
toward the crows, opening blacknesses
into air. The woman's lips are moving. She is listening
to a lesson in a foreign language on her earphones
while through the smeared windows of the cab
she sees the lake, the ducks riding tips of arrowheads
of their own making.

In the park, a woman stops her tractor
and jumps down to adjust a coupling, the engine
running, the air a roaring halo
around her and the machinery. She takes off her earphones,
shakes her hair loose. Wet grass falls in clumps
from the corkscrew blades. It's still raining.

A woman drives a mowing machine
up and down the green slopes. The hundred hinges and bevels
of the trailer are freshly oiled and so well
adjusted it can give itself to every hill or gully
it rolls along, metal fitting easily
to landscape, stroking it, ranks of razor-sharp blades
become the palm of my hand.

(appeared in Poetry Northwest, 1992)

AQUARIAN

Dim in the attic
where my father kept his fish, the tanks
murmured and curved as I moved along
the iridescent row, the waters
cool blue-green as the paint he'd hand-
brushed on each tank's back wall.
Angels floated there, and tetras with neon
shining from their small forms so hard
it was more than skin deep. The lumpy Oscar ogled
Siamese fighting-fish fluttering their ribbons
from solitary confinements. Snails born daily
sucked their way along the glass. My father
reached in and crushed their transparent shells
with his fingers: fish food. My father dipped
a white net: in the palm of his hand
he stroked a guppy's scratch with mercurochrome
on a glass wand. The whole place slid
under water. I could fit inside
the moon suit of the miniature man.

(appeared in Portland Review, 1994)

LIKE WATCHING WATER

curled leaves -- copper, wine, and rust --
light arriving at windows
invisible lines
easy between us

your face --
the pulse under your skin
fine lines branching
all the small lovely moves
wrist-hinge
words
a moon-thread caught in the sky

smiling inside
got away with my life
leaves brilliant by
the situated house

barrows of junk
wheeled away

(appeared in The Poem and the World, Vol. III, Seattle, WA: The Literary Center, 1994)