Rattlers
Crows convene
Concatenating gossip with business
Their sound rummages these trees
Filtering through my shrine
Of mordant bramble
And scalar lime
Altar without sacraments
Mockingbird and Titmouse
Halloo Solomon’s song
Of love and longing
Where sheep once
Pilled the nubbins
Of fickle grass
From sweatered hills
Now tall trees toll in high wind
And the ground is littered
With casks of nut
Helicopter maple child
And scatted spoor
Bumblebee tends his nursery
Not industrious
But rather joyful
What else could he be or do
This is why he was made
And it is his joy
To be so made
His small sound
A cochlear tickle
A runic verse of untoil
Was always and is still is
Sung on these
Newly wooded hills
Where long ago
Tenants carved out farms
Pastures and orchards
From these improbable slopes
Day in and year out
Their plows sang stone
The glacier’s midden
Cruelly served up as a new crop
Of boulder chaff every spring
These bony children festoon each
Ridgeline and hollow
Stone field running lines
Demarcations of frozen labor
Left fallow in gaunt sun
They were squeezed out of winter bowel
Pushed up by this same grim earth
That gaily pushes blizzard clouds
Of slow seed
And rutting bucks
Hammering their first mossy horns
In the rhythm their fathers taught them
While they dreamed of jumping
In their mother’s wombs
This same loyal earth that
Pulls me up this hill
Drawn by a code of light
Telling me of green
Whispering of green
Insinuating it in moss and shadow
Bellowing it across a canvas of cedar
Fomenting it in the windy torn rabble
Of leaf and seed casing
That fills my boots and eyes
Only the occasional prohibition flask
Glittering in a bower of tin
Glass cataracted by
Decades of rain
Or a piece of the devil’s hatband
Ingrown into a Walnut trunk
Subsumed into her stubborn will
Her decade-patience victorious
These are all that
Remain to remind
How hard they worked
These limestone steps
Of feral clay that sticks
To the boots like hot tar
But the same creeks still run
Past the same stone corrals
The same songs are still sung
By weltered fowl
And Coyote alike
And Rattlers still live in these cliffs
But you never see them
Except in some hawk’s claw
As she flares her wings
In ground effect billow
And settles to dinner
My boots tick alone
Along the ridgeline
My uncertain legs navigate
The broken field running
Of hope and toil
My attenuated feet
Search for touchstones
From the great height of
Their numbness
And all the while
I look out for the rattlers
They are even less visible to me
Than those farmer’s whisky traces
Their patience would unnerve me
But for my heavy boots
And walking staff
They seem less like me than
Birch bark
Or Nettles
Yet in their cool minds
A Brownian motion
Of mouse tails
And chick wails
A convection of
Involuted hungers
Simmers quietly
At a degree or so
Above absolute zero
Not so different after all
Concatenating gossip with business
Their sound rummages these trees
Filtering through my shrine
Of mordant bramble
And scalar lime
Altar without sacraments
Mockingbird and Titmouse
Halloo Solomon’s song
Of love and longing
Where sheep once
Pilled the nubbins
Of fickle grass
From sweatered hills
Now tall trees toll in high wind
And the ground is littered
With casks of nut
Helicopter maple child
And scatted spoor
Bumblebee tends his nursery
Not industrious
But rather joyful
What else could he be or do
This is why he was made
And it is his joy
To be so made
His small sound
A cochlear tickle
A runic verse of untoil
Was always and is still is
Sung on these
Newly wooded hills
Where long ago
Tenants carved out farms
Pastures and orchards
From these improbable slopes
Day in and year out
Their plows sang stone
The glacier’s midden
Cruelly served up as a new crop
Of boulder chaff every spring
These bony children festoon each
Ridgeline and hollow
Stone field running lines
Demarcations of frozen labor
Left fallow in gaunt sun
They were squeezed out of winter bowel
Pushed up by this same grim earth
That gaily pushes blizzard clouds
Of slow seed
And rutting bucks
Hammering their first mossy horns
In the rhythm their fathers taught them
While they dreamed of jumping
In their mother’s wombs
This same loyal earth that
Pulls me up this hill
Drawn by a code of light
Telling me of green
Whispering of green
Insinuating it in moss and shadow
Bellowing it across a canvas of cedar
Fomenting it in the windy torn rabble
Of leaf and seed casing
That fills my boots and eyes
Only the occasional prohibition flask
Glittering in a bower of tin
Glass cataracted by
Decades of rain
Or a piece of the devil’s hatband
Ingrown into a Walnut trunk
Subsumed into her stubborn will
Her decade-patience victorious
These are all that
Remain to remind
How hard they worked
These limestone steps
Of feral clay that sticks
To the boots like hot tar
But the same creeks still run
Past the same stone corrals
The same songs are still sung
By weltered fowl
And Coyote alike
And Rattlers still live in these cliffs
But you never see them
Except in some hawk’s claw
As she flares her wings
In ground effect billow
And settles to dinner
My boots tick alone
Along the ridgeline
My uncertain legs navigate
The broken field running
Of hope and toil
My attenuated feet
Search for touchstones
From the great height of
Their numbness
And all the while
I look out for the rattlers
They are even less visible to me
Than those farmer’s whisky traces
Their patience would unnerve me
But for my heavy boots
And walking staff
They seem less like me than
Birch bark
Or Nettles
Yet in their cool minds
A Brownian motion
Of mouse tails
And chick wails
A convection of
Involuted hungers
Simmers quietly
At a degree or so
Above absolute zero
Not so different after all
