October Field
—Poems and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA
HISTORICAL ZAP-BACK
The Squaw Hollow Sensation
An Aztec mummy brought to life?
There must be one good reason why
a German doctor scalpel-knife
took it as his duty, to try
the voltage shock. To vivify
an Aztec mummy! Brought to life
in our dry foothills—mummy-dry—
with abscessed teeth and skull-pan rife
with centuries. Old dusty strife
of history under speechless sky.
An Aztec mummy brought to life
must question, if electric-fry
was worth this promised by-and-by.
His desiccated afterlife.
How could the doctor’s lightning fly
an Aztec mummy back to life?
Snow
SNOW CREATURES
So cold, you didn’t even feel it
when something sliced your wrist open
as you got on the chair-lift. Burst of blood
arterial. You held pressure
to the top, the warming hut where Ski Patrol
took over. As they bandage you,
you sense a surge of life from the hut’s dark
corner. Huge, black forms converge
from those depths, sniffing, intent to get
to you. Shine of white teeth in wide
jaws. Smell of blood drawing them like
scent of the injured buried under snow.
Avalanche dogs trained to find life—
however cold and buried—and bring it back
to light, to time and space. If their
handlers would let them, they’d lick your
wounds and nuzzle, comforting, your face.
Chaparral
CHAPARRAL STILL-LIFE
In a maze of red-dirt roads and scrub-brush,
I’m searching for redbud rusty-amber among
manzanita, toyon, coyote-bush, chamise,
and ghost-pine. I find a still-life:
black vinyl bucket seat of a cheap sedan,
a director’s chair without a back, and
a collapsing stool draped with Old Glory.
Before I can snap a pic, a white van
pulls up, loads bucket seat, stool, flag, and
director’s chair. Chaparral litter patrol,
or evicting the homeless?
Pond
NOTES BEFORE PROMISED RAIN
A plank bridge over the creek (dry).
Field of summer-dead wild oats—Eurasian
invader, silver-gold in October light.
A side-path seeks the pond.
Native bunchgrass along the way to water.
Sudden wing-clatter. Duck or swan
gone but for ripples into bulrush, willow,
bramble. Break out of oaks, there’s a breeze.
Clouds non-committal as to rain or
clearing. Listen—a whisper?
Mossed Indian grinding rocks, the mortar-
holes full of dead leaves.
Oaks still drop their acorns for no one
but the gone, the lost, the wild.
Finding Rock
THE FINDING ROCK
Cresting the hill from the bedrock mortars—
acorn grinding rocks of the Nisenan
(gone now from here)—I found a boulder, bigger
than any around these meadows or the pond.
It looked like a small beached whale,
placid on its perch above the path. From another
angle, it was a legless snub-nosed dog
of immense proportion and yet not monstrous—
lost in thought. One candid eye like a
lipped-down blowhole off the darkling creature’s
back. Someone had scrawled a single illegible
word on its flank. A split-ring of white
plastic—broken seal from a bottle?—topped
its head like a tiny wreath, a crown,
a halo, or simply a bit of litter. You find
what you look for, in such a rock.
Redbud
WE HAVE SONGS
from poems by D.R. Wagner
There was a shortage of the real stuff, rust-
colored rain, the way breeze tricks the essentials
of the idyll to crackle and glow. Angel names.
Things have memory. The dark coming,
swirling waves upon ocean and the edge
of languid sloughs. Be careful where you walk
holding hands, the light beginning silver grey.
A gauntlet of monsters nevertheless
beautiful. Night birds. They only want us
gone. A coyote passing on the horizon,
the entire landscape to bring us to tears—
synapses and thought canals a broken glass
becoming a kind of singing. It takes
all of our lives. We could cross the line:
an antique melody, a new song. Sometimes
it has a voice. The veins are fuses.
A Certain Light
Today’s LittleNip:
IN A CERTAIN LIGHT
our plain gray squirrel holds aloft
his sun-struck furry tail in halo.
—Taylor Graham
____________________
—Medusa, with thanks to Taylor Graham this morning for her fine songs of the foothills, a few about monsters (for the season), and some fine fall fotos, as well!
—Anonymous Photo
Celebrate poetry!—and the promised rain!
Photos in this column can be enlarged by clicking on them once,
then click on the X in the top right corner to come back
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