Our Wild Ones

A Shadow of Dread

—Photo by Taylor Graham

FREE-CLIMB
—Taylor Graham, Placerville

Halfway up the new screen door—
its glass slid aside
this first warm day in February,
almost-spring of our kitten’s life—

Blink hangs by four curved claws
between dread
of falling, and dread of never
quite living. His hind-claws boost

him higher toward the ceiling.
Nothing keeps him
from a visible, unattainable world—
free air, free birds!—

except the fine-mesh screen.
Outside, graceful arch of oak limb
just leafing out; bird-feeder wild
with sparrows. And inside,

Blink—forelegs extended as if
crucified with desire
to leave his walled life, to reach
to embrace the world.

______________________

WIRELESS
—Taylor Graham  

 
The small silver box blinks at me, a green light unknown to nature. It says I have 1 missed call: 10-digit number; date and time. How could I have missed it? Where’s the message? This new system is beyond my understanding. The old dread rises: I’m becoming a little more extinct with every breath.

My dog lies quiet at my feet, chewing a bone for its messages of life passed. Forget the phone. I’ll take my dog for a walk under oaks about to leaf out naturally green as March. If I miss a call, it may not matter.

Messages in my
dog’s every ear-flick. Messages
in the phoebe’s song.

_______________________ 

MOON ABOVE THE WIRES,

above roof and floorboards.
Underneath the house, black space, a void
calling for Wild.
While we were trying to hold onto
papers and forms
the kitten found a gap, a crevice
into crawlspace. Shadow on shadow,
world below our feet
where moonlight won’t penetrate, black
horizon our kitten found—no mice,
no skitter-flitter bird flight.
Nether silence, heart of famine
as we searched the upper house-scape.
Past suppertime, from floorboards
came a muffled mew
mournful, lonesome. At last
dragged out by his kitten-scruff,
tonight under a half-moon, against my ear
the lost-found kitten purrs.


—Taylor Graham 

_______________________

DROUGHT AND TAXES
 —Taylor Graham 

 
If after all these years we’re still
together, then it’s a clutter of planning
and improv, jars of chutney,
old tax returns, bird skins not yet sent
to museum. If the two of us
are paired parentheses, then we hold
something together, a language
before it’s lost. If we hoard images
behind a coupled eye,
one is a campsite in the midnight
sun-shadow of Denali.
And if we’re glued together
in a decoupage of bats, forsythia,
and winter sunrise,
then thousands of snatches of moon-
light are filed away safer
than boxes, furtive as memory
after all these years.

Carol Louise Moon and Barkley

TREMENDOUS DIMINUTIVE
—Carol Louise Moon, Sacramento

Tremendous Diminutive is soft curves, 

black Vienna sausage tail. Four stick legs 

are no more than for a doll luncheon table, 

supporting the Dachshund dogbody of this 

tiny Pinscher, which is the mainstay heavy 

main-stock. Twin doe ears flop and bob 

above the sweetest-head; two rotating eye-

thoughts of expression with a prankster-

knowing look. A small tongue protrudes 

from upper-body beautiful like red lettuce 

below a leather-button nose (two big unsewn 

holes). The tan-handsome broad chest of 

volleyball-playing lifeguards exudes 

confidence that he is Guard Dog, even 

lifeguard-dog-to-the-rescue, Macho Dog.

But, enough of Tremendous Diminutive 

photo-op. What of characteristics? What 

of inner worth to pet owner? Faithfulsome 

tendencies toward Lady-of-the-Apartment 

Carolina falter and are broken merely 

momentarily, but are easily and quick-

silver forgiven. Steady diet of affectionate 

lick sounds matched only by the crunch-

kibble-crunch of each and every afternoon. 

Kisses dogward are silent due to lips buried 

deep into “seal fur” atop this doggie sweetest-

head.

______________________

VOLLEY THAT BALL
—Carol Louise Moon

Barkley the miniature Doberman lives well 

in midtown, running along the sidewalk, or 

riding in his dog stroller through a neighborhood 

of like-minded dogs.  When not out and about 

on the town, Barkley is playing one of several

indoor games.

The apartment has a very small nook separate 

from the main studio, partitioned with a gray 

plastic child-gate which serves as Barkley’s 

volleyball “net” for his morning and evening 

rounds of volleyball with Mistress Carolina.
Barkley positions the ball with precision between 

two paws and “serves” the small ball over the 

“net” with his nose. He is also known to “spike” 

the ball with one paw when receiving a volley. 

Otherwise, he returns volley-for-volley with his 

nose, in quick response.

His enthusiastic jumps lead Carolina to consider 

signing him up for city league basketball. If 

someone will please name their team 

The Dobermans, she knows a very cute, 

talented mascot!

______________________

FIDDLERS IN CLOSE QUARTERS

—Tom Goff

       for David Houston and String Theory

What strikes me is how, when cramped for space,
violinists will still massage their bows
so’s not to fiddlestick the face
of a next-door-shoulder, a neighbor stringfellow
virtuoso-swirled into the jigsaw pace.

Not once does violist Michael Frost,
while he slithers the fingerboard slalom run,
upbow his upbow too tempest-tossed,
no misplaced tip ever smacks or abrades a spun-
sugar painting’s impasto that hangs embossed

on the wall, out of bowshot, we hope, at Luna’s.
No eyeballs endangered? (O Fortuna!)…

_____________________

OUR WILD ONES

—Tom Goff

(in memory of Marie Ross and Michael J. Cluff)

A student reminisces with me at lunch
in the glassy cafeteria around which loom
the Folsom hills: growing up, she would see,
on grasses just south of Highway 50, a small
herd, not of cattle, but horses, the purest
of wild horses. Few enough to count;
she counted them. Five; then three; one,
then gone. Did they starve, were they sold?
What cattle now graze there, we prefer
not to mention, but murmur of the lost
ones a while. We’re looking out on these
greenhill expanses the rainless heavens
have grayed one by one, in small batches
rich with houses, not horses.

And what of our wild ones? Where do they go
dwindling, these lyric horses? Will our wild
lutenists plant themselves on Parnassian slopes,
as does that brave new Tuscany all around us?
When all are gone from our sight, how
is that fair, how can we even talk of
a herd being culled? My student lives
high up in the green uplands of Lotus,
where downhill
the rapid cold water runs Lethe.

____________________

Today's LittleNip:

HUGO AND LONGFELLOW

—B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA

(for two late February poets: Victor Hugo, 2/26
and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 2/27)

We note celebrity dates:
Hugo a city romantic
composed Hernani
became an opera pick,

Longfellow wrote of
Hiawatha's fate and pride
also Paul Revere's
great ride.

____________________

—Medusa

—Photo taken in Berkeley by Cynthia Linville, Sacramento