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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 2002)
PAGE 6 TURNING TO WOMEN My friends are men. They think their heart a river they can ford They take no deep breath to go for the bottom, to grab muck. To turn to women I must float my heart on a kindling raft, wade into greasy water, yell and try to cry. This is wind in dead trees Women tell me kindly, We are everywhere you go like light reaching around to morning Forget success. Blow it from a mountain. What you’re after is how to move along your spine, not on the land. There is nothing out there you’re coming to. You wait to come to your skin like spring water rising You will touch things that become and die in days, insects, flowers, hundreds POETRY Only touch makes sense. Strange to touch things underwater. Turning to women makes my stomach feather. I want high ground The black rock must be obsidian. I scratch my name Rain can cut it in so deep the rock must crumble to wear it out. I tell men that turning to women may be as simple as water through land LOVE AFFAIR WITH A WAITRESS No, they say, your fear talks, not some white cloud calling. You want to hold your gone mother, kiss away her cunning tears. This slop we barrel to fatten pigs. We take your pouch, notebook and trapping string Scatter like birds. She pours coffee I drink it. - morris mcgarry You men who move to have children, eat, kill or die — keep your shoulders huge in bear skins. Dance around your lightning tree, go hounding and back to your big room of heads of cats. You won’t feel why your chests are marked with breasts I leave my sex in river mud rolling in spring, curl in high trees in the nervousness of small animals, and see how loons and deer live by a different light. BARN SWALLOW Metal-still on the shed-roof tin until it cocks its head to eye the world which has begun to crack its own black shell until its claws pull its body in with soft trigger-pressures it’s up and up higher all up in an arc wheeling down swooping and screaming smoothly down dead on the twisting trail of a dragonfly which turns quickly in the silver signals of its wings until the swallow takes that silver for treasure in its beak and the beak’s blunt scissor shuts down hard and harder then the bird pitches down the sheer cliffs of air slipstreaming God to the shed-roof where it sits and eats and is out again spinning a thin blade turning on a dotty moth dazed from every side by light and stoneblinded surely by this cataract of black and is an air-ace barnstorming stealing the stomachs of the watchers with its dolphin’s bounce from an air to an air and twists tricks turnings for the joy of it and flies butterfly-fluttery at all edges of the sky and there turns as quickly as a liar in a lie -MICHAEL HARRIS BIKER Pulling away from a stoplight with a tire’s sharp bark, he lifts his scuffed boot and kicks at the air, and the old dog of inertia gets up with a growl and shrinks out of the way -TED KOO SER SUNFLOWERS Nine sunflowers against a wall, heavy with the load of summer, their stems thick but leaning like telephone poles, their heads over-large, once jammed with seeds like teeth Life ran up, now runs down, the leaves pock holes of missing seeds, swelling at the rims, peeling underneath Summer was a fist. Still, their obedient crippled heads search for the sun, which is moving south. FLOWERING PRIVET Left to itself, the hedge gradually rises past roses, delphiniums, higher than doors and windows till it reaches the trees and becomes a green train, bearing sparrows and warblers into summer. The night comes down floor by floor. My skin is the scared boy of my memory, but I will wait and let all I was go as deep grass lets go light when a wind rushes. Already the iris have lowered their sails. Petals litter the grass and then sink into it. And robins, which tumbled so lately from the nest to tremble under the hemlocks are floating, drifting, learning to track the worm’s slow exodus. -PETER SEARS Already the sun approaches its zenith. Soon each day will again be less than the last. Finally the hedge itself enters into the glory, grows milky with stars whose fragrance thrills the bees. Butterflies flicker like signal lights. INTO THE WIND Sitting again on the front porch of the first cabin. Grind of the deerfly, hone of the bee Someone is mourning inconsolably somewhere else. Yellow of goldenrod, bronze of the grass. By the creek bridge, the aspen leaves are waving goodbye, goodbye Silence of paint brush and cow pink. ' Take the dirt from the old trail up in your hand, Pilgrim, and throw it into the wind. At night the opossum mounts a billowy frond and sways as if bewitched. Voles twitter and twitch at its base, nibbling crisp shoots. And someone stepping out on the porch for a moment into the scented shade, feels a gust of wind on her face, as if she has just plunged into the wake of something rushing past in the dark. -JANE FLANDERS -CHARLES WRIGHT dead red sun grow again I am young -MPMc DARK CIRCLE My little one, they roasted pigs in Nevada as a test in the 50s and on the film you can see people with suits on in the confused pen and then on the vast stretching desert floor they slip the pigs into aluminum clothes holes cut in the sides and then they are placed into boxes on stilts all in a row and blasted with a nuclear blast to see how well their skin survives a plutonium wind So like human skin. So like suede on my shoes. So like the split in the avocado pit I keep above water to save, seeing the knotted thing inside that takes forever to grow, seeing my hair in braids, they wrap around my neck owning me I am a pyromaniac and my silken strands, ties for a Coleman lantern mantel -SUSAN ANDERSON CONTINUITY The moths will continue to commit suicide and I will continue to paint my fingernails red Until there is a change -DAWN DeSYLVIA FOLKSONG FOR WHOEVER DREAMED UP THE CHILDPROOF PILL BOTTLE Daddy read what it said. Daddy sweated and swore. Daddy punched the bottle To the bathroom floor. Sonny grabbed the bottle Sonny couldn't read. But he sized up the problem With child-like speed Sonny chopped the top off. The pills scattered wide He picked them up, ate them, And promptly died. -SEAN McGIFFERT -STANLEY RADHUBER FUTURE FOREST GOODBYE MONOCULTURE HELLO GENOCULTURE Our father was a birch, Our mother was a spruce. We all have just one name; They call us Bruce. Once, various this wood. Now we’re all the same; That’s why we trees All have my name. Not only that, but when I see another tree, The bough to whom I bow Is really me. You see, a clever beast From chromosomes took genes, And mixed them with ideas To make a seed. It split that single seed Into a multitude, And grew myselves all here For only its own good. Oh yes, we’re happy here. The problem is — we know 'Twould take but one good trick To lay us all me low. -LARRY BARROWS
