Swimming in Quicksand

Wild Cherry

—Poems and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

VERY EARLY ON EARTH DAY

           for Cowboy

My dog calls me out of sleep.
Overnight the wind has rearranged
everything. The sun’s first rays
just now exploding gold shrapnel
over the east ridge.

And everything is moving. Sun-shatter
through leaves, and wind plucking
overnight spider-webs till they
hum gold filament against the dark
trunks of oaks,

everything flowing, glowing
gold-green, a morning I couldn’t
describe. And so my dog stands
simply wagging.
    Wasn’t he good
to bring me here?
 

(first pub. in Penumbra and in What the Wind Says. Earth Day 2018 was April 22.)

IN THE NATURE AREA

This Earth Day, ponderosa forest
and meadow green are gathered to see
wild cherry in blooming blossom
as white as snow puffs on the breeze.

Three bark-slab tepees solid
in a row. How many springs of cherry
blossoming do they remember
to soft beating of the drum, marrying

dance with meadow grass, as
we sit pondside, hunched over words
of poetry? In the distance, uncanny
hum of digeridoo. A girl

is dancing with a streamer blue
as sky and swirling, and someone is
blowing bubbles and the cherry
lets loose one petal white as cloud.

REFLUENT

Tide’s out. You’re searching riverbank in waders and raingear—gush and suck of mud. Where does water stop and land begin? Prairie landscape in gray, wind’s a samurai sword, a bowling ball knocking everything down. An old dock, half-submerged, the only token for a Monopoly-set where nobody wins. Is that a bloated body your dog steps across? No, heap of bed and mattress weathered way beyond human scent. By the grace of four legs a dog moves ahead. You’re wading, each waffle-iron print dissolves behind you. Water deepens; mud, 50 pounds of lead bars in your waders. Rain’s steady as wind. Protagonist of this search went fishing and never came back. Where’s his boat? Quicksand pulls you down, a drowning-horse. No hitching post to grab for, not a tree. Swim on mud, your yellow-suited body a boogie-board to reach the other side. Fisherman’s somewhere under the tides.

ENDANGERED SPECIES

From chaparral there rises a low hill.               
It’s just a jog, a pebble’s breath from home           
when all of April’s glories burst and spill           

around us. Then that hill seems monochrome               
as sand, chamise and deerbrush. Drab and bare.       
It’s just a jog, a pebble’s breath from home           

and we cruise by as if there’s nothing there.           
Pure native scrub. Not graded, paved or sold.       
As sand, chamise, and deerbrush drab and bare,       

it’s guarded by a gate. Beyond, wild gold           
of el dorado mule-ears and rush-rose—       
pure native scrub not graded, paved or sold.           

We can’t enter this sanctum, I suppose,           
that keeps its secrets from the traveler’s eye—   
of el dorado mule-ears and rush-rose,           

of hummingbird and frog and butterfly.           
From chaparral there rises a low hill               
that keeps its secrets from the traveler’s eye       
when all of April’s glories burst and spill.

LOVING BEDROCK

From his rocky hilltop he watches
the creek cutting deeper with winter storms,
flooding the road, leaving sand-bars
where was grassy field; oxbows grassing over
in spring. Up here on his hilltop, he loves
rock heaps even when they get in the way
of his mower. He likes to tell the grandkids
about the time—he verged a lazy river
far away; walking the bank— sinking.
Quicksand? His feet being sucked straight
down. He flopped on his belly, started
swimming for solid ground. He made it.
He likes to tell the grandkids how he loves
this rocky hilltop far above sandbars,
oxbows, water forever remaking its bed,
wanting to pull him to sleep there.

WATCH YOUR STEP

Waist-high green already, mid-April, field
quilted dense with vetch and clover, filaree
holding high its pointed clock-springs
like so many bunched birdlings lifting
their bills in famished song.

I’m wading through dregs of miner’s lettuce,
chickweed, lacy flourishes of thistle rising.
No way to watch my step, my boots 
out of sight in green. Only the birds are late,
this year. Where—

oh! there—dead grass sticking out of nest-
box #4, hanging from an oak limb. Carefully
open the door, reach in—feel dead grass
of bluebird nest, and something very soft.
Tilt the box gently, peek inside—

blue-gray feather sheen; one dark bright
eye staring directly at me without moving.
I slip the door shut; walk softly away.
Plenty of time to count the eggs
before they hatch.

Today’s LittleNip:

WITHERED iPAD

—Taylor Graham

What I typed in the subject-
line was “1st pix with
red ipad” but the spellcheck gods
changed it to “withered.” Not
her fault. My brand-new device
(red cover so I can find her
in the dark indoors)—Red does
her best under inscrutable
laws of electronics.

Two days lost in my desert
of befuddlement, trying
to get a wireless tangle of apps
working together. It didn’t work.
But there, miraculously
by email, a poem
for trekking wilderness
beyond the reach of wifi,
Red kept it in her little red heart.

___________________

Many thanks to Taylor Graham for today’s fine poems and pix on this, National Poem in Your Pocket Day. For more about that, see www.poets.org/national-poetry-month/poem-your-pocket-day/.

Today, from 11:45-1:30pm, Calif. Lawyers for the Arts will celebrate World Intellectual Property Week by presenting a panel on copyrights entitled “Copyright, Trademark and Patent Law: How They Differ and Where They Intersect”, with attorneys Steve Davis, Brad Heisler, Mark Leonard. County Bar Association, 425 University Av., Ste. 120, Sacramento.

In poetry readings, Dr. Andy Jones will read at the UC Davis Library tonight from 7-8pm, and Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Cafe will present featured readers and open mic on 16th St. in Sacramento, 8pm.

A couple of events just in: on this coming Monday at 7pm, Davis will present an end-of-National-Poetry-Month reading at John Natsoulas Gallery, featuring Jane Hirshfield, Indigo Moor, Linda Scheller, and Gerry Pineda. Doors open at 6:30; get there early to get a seat! More info at www.indigomoor.org/natsoulas-gallery-reading/.

And on the weekend of May 4-6, Gold Rush Writers will present their 2018 Writers’ Conference, with workshops, panels, speakers, and so on. See www.goldrushwriters.com for info and to register. Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about these and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa

 Celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day!

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