Self-Portrait
I’ve fashioned profession out of crow call
and graphite, blind stubbing blunt instruments
against a blank white sky.
Ain’t how fall
you far what gets you.
It’s the lines you fence,
the limb you didn’t lop in time to stop
the beetles from taking their cut, the peach
shriveled to a furry forgot-to-rot
ladder high, conspiring despite the bleach,
alcohol, ammonia.
Whatever kills
the “you’ve wasted your life.”
The mind scurries.
Termites assemble in the attic.
Bills
gather in slow sloping shelves.
Why worry?
My address is printed right there, my name
a home that when the roof leaks blames the rain.
The Lunar Model of Regeneration
So the divorce was coming down the pike,
and Coyote was, they say, not himself
but some sudden sot impatient to light
the fuse and send the whole mess straight to hell.
Coyote wrote himself a prescription
having self-diagnosed his impending
disintegration.
Those days, possession
of less than an ounce would get a man time
and a half, guaranteed, but Coyote
knew how to get around The Man when he
materialized, mirror-eyed chaparral.
So Coyote rambled the script by seam
and smoked the cumulus into the sky.
And lapped the salt eye.
And drank the road dry.
So where were we?
Ah, so Coyote’s dead
and didn’t like it one bit, what with all
the buzzing churning his body to dirt.
He missed, of all things, the sexts he’d drunk dial
his wife: “Guess what this is” with the object
in question blurrily posed as buckeye
branch or Manzanita limb.
“Expect
the unexpected,” he would type, reclined
and half-erect.
Coyote smiled even
though he was dead.
Reminiscing over
those selfies scattered Coyote’s leaving,
inspired him to new heights of exposure,
each thought a pulse of spring germinating.
Our lives a mosaic of mistaking.
Hunter’s Moon
in winter stubble
humming ember throb
a caloric scramble
stalk – stem – husk
each owl
quarters the vole
the small furry
smolder
for seconds
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