Bloodhound Blues
1.
One lonely dog
sniffs the weight
of an endless day
If he remembered yesterday,
he would smell
nothing new
Two lonely dogs
mismatched in the same yard
can=t howl one note
at the same moon
The scent of the moon,
unreachable to the dogs
drives them to give voice
to nothing
other scents travel their way
tickle inner passages
and awaken old lies
The scent of deception
always stirs the blood
in wrong directions
The hounds will only follow
the trails unmarked
by corruption
2.
Hound dogs have found the gravestones
of the blood they smell
No one walks here anymore
no more old feet to sniff
no rotting bones to chew
just dust, and the faded headstones
too bored to open their eyes
3.
Two old dogs
sniff the weight of the night
By the time they forget
those old graves,
the morning sun will have erased
their last traces.
The Imps of Hieronymous Bosch
In a garden of heavenly delights, a long line forms in front of a promise to meet God. In person. No one in line wonders if that is an oxymoron: God, in person. It=s a long line for the opportunity to find out. Some who stand here have waited for eons and the weight of the wait has left scars. There have been fights, insults, ambushes and other episodic unpleasantness. Ideas and images of God are greatly varied and that often leads to trouble. Those nearest the front of the line are the most important: in their minds, certain promises were made and they will wait in this line until these promises are kept. They will wait a much longer time than all together can imagine.
Imagine God=s surprise at the myriad of conflicting promises they have been accused of making. Those in line will find that all is not as promised, as soon as they give up and step out of line. The rivers also flow out of the garden and some things that grow here are poisonous. Not poison in the conventional sense of the word, but poison in the transmutational sense. Snakes also crawl in these gardens, offering transmutation on the fang. Surprised? Don=t be. Step lightly here, even if you think you can=t be killed again. On the other hand, no fruit is forbidden here, the only thing forbidden is the word forbidden. Is that too much power, for those who spent entire lifetimes defining themselves only by what is forbidden, wasting good time trying to enforce that which they forbade, believing God would not trust humanity with the power of our own senses?
Too much can only become not enough, so their devils whisper in their ears, with devilish fingers up their noses and lit matches between their toes.
Watch the rivers flow out of these gardens and imagine other heavenly gardens watered by these same rivers. What was promised in those heavens? How long are the lines? Are there refreshments while you wait or do the gardens run dry? Are their poisons digestible or do their snakes have fangs at all? Behold, a Boatman waits to give you a ride. They form a network, these rivers, and the Boatmen who ply them only share their maps with each other, in the way of the ancients with their hermetic stealth. Nothing is secret in these heavens, not the gardens, not the voices or the songs, not the promises whispered by gods beyond books and gods beyond promises, not the courses of rivers or the meanders of snakes, up and down ladders among heavens.
Desert Suite #14: Love/Hate
Drift/dream in a hot car backseat corner with
no AC across the desert, again
chainsmoker at the wheel
Outside, hostile desert framed by speeding
car window, jagged fire and rusted glory
turns to red silt in my veins, heat so thick
it brings the rust to life, holds the desert’s dead
like amber quicksand. No desert can speed
by fast enough but Coyote at the wheel, he’s
not speeding to escape it, he’s speeding deeper
into it. Hellbent into the desert, his head knows
why but his heart does not
I’m afraid to touch this earth which holds all
that I fear, this ferocity which accuses me of
being blind to the desert by day while I walk
it on nightbird wings in my unconscious nights,
the burn scars on my feetbottoms ripped open
fresh night after rapturless night. Why shouldn’t
I fear a devil’s chariot ride across hell when I am
just a prisoner?
It clutches at me, tarantula hooks creep at me
in my dreams, these nightmare days in the
desert but it is mistaken, I will never belong to it
Coyote smoke chokes me inside, red dust demons
choke me outside, dry claws always at my throat.
Tear at my flesh but I only bleed dust. Burn out
my eyes but I still see your Holy Ghosts, I still
read your petroglyphs, I still hear what the desert
whispers in my ear. I wish I could repeat but it
doesn’t translate. I will wait a thousand centuries
before my own words learn to speak, before my
footprints up these canyon rocks grow six toes,
more toes, with each vertical step
These cut-through roads, they are only shards, they
melt and shatter at the whim of the desert, they sit soft
and fragile on unstable ground, they shatter the desert
with their cuts
I dig the shards out of my dreams using scorpion claws,
stitch the wounds with spiderweb threads, recite the
prayers of the rock faces, snatch the poems from the
desert wind, construct a crippled mosaic which is no
more than blasphemous elegy, the positive test of
the desert in my blood, the fang broken off in
my hand
Keep that smoke to yourself, Coyote. Your hand does
not fit in mine. When your shadow crosses the sun, my
face is to the moon. This road you chew up and spit out,
I put the pieces back together to build a private path. I
washed off your blood and donated my own, a stratified
transfusion redder than red, hotter than heat, ripe with the
ghosts, the poisons that call the desert home.
Desert Suite #15: Ghosts
The Joshua Trees in their wild dances under fire-flame sunsets,
swayed by transient winds, they wave when I pass through but
they don’t wave to me
I am as much ghost to them as they are tree to me
Sparse groves spread out in the wind, yucca halos outlined sharp
and dark against the light between dead and awake, drybed woods
and canyon twists, wilderness without the sight of roads or the
smell of man, cut and polished by element
where all ghosts are holy
where reptile prints set borders trace tales on the rocks in the sand
where ghosttalk chatter stirs the breeze
where one crow does not sound like another
frantic arms of ocotillo wave at dry lightning, the light of old worlds
and new worlds born and died, fused and immaculate in the eyes
of their prophets
in the hearts of their ghosts
who walk in fractured light on birdclaw feet and smoke rings, who
take form in treearm shadows, who don’t always hide their fangs
but the crows know one ghost from another, desert by desert
borderless, holy and unholy lands.
Desert Suite #16: I-10, Deming to Tucson
On a long string
of 4am road
nothing but a sliver
of waning moon
and headlights
to break the dark,
light snow
off the shoulder
sparkles like
dirty diamonds,
winter wind
fights the car,
hand of
a desert god
ready to slap me
right off the road
There is no dark
no alone
like a 4am
desert road with
Coyote on the wind
*
Jagged mountain skyline
reveals itself
in the eastern light
in my rearview,
western edge colours
reflect pink blue lavender
across the hour
crow crosses
pale yellow moonsliver
as it fades and drops
into pastel dawn
desert shades
slow to shake
the night shadows
frozen in winter wind
thin sheets of fog
hover just above
the road, pulled
thin and holey by
air currents of
birds and highway
eastbound train
brings urban
spraycan art
to naked desert
awake and bright now,
desert moves slow
in sharp cold,
oblivious to the
speed of the road.
Kimberly White’s latest novel is Waterfall Girls (CLASH Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Cream City Review, The CRANK, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of four chapbooks, Penelope, A Reachable Tibet, The Daily Diaries of Death, and Letters to a Dead Man; as well as two other novels: Bandy’s Restola, and Hotel Tarantula. She also dabbles in other arts, and spends most of her time in Northern California with her pens and papers and massive collection of Tarot decks.
No comments:
Post a Comment