Tag: Bristlecone 2024 August

Penelope Scambly Schott

I Offer You My Landscape

October snow
down to the lower slopes of the mountain,
the brown hills of fall,

boys in their football helmets
busy running drills,
this lighted sign for Homecoming Week—

come home.

Or if this little town never was your home,
say you grew up someplace far away,
come anyhow.

I will bake an apple pie in a blue pie pan,
polish my grandma’s silver napkin ring
for your ironed white napkin.

When you arrive, when I hug you this hard
against my breasts, I will never confess
how much I needed you.

Penelope Scambly Schott’s most recent book is Waving Fly Swatters At Angels. She lives in the small wheat-growing town of Dufur, Oregon (pop.: 635). She is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

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David J. Rothman

Step by Step

— after Paul Valéry
— in memoriam Emily Gaynor Rothman (1964-2020)

1.
Tes pas, enfants de mon silence,
Saintement, lentement placés,
Vers le lit de ma vigilanc
Procèdent muets et glacés.

Personne pure, ombre divine,
Qu’ils sont doux, tes pas retenus!
Dieux!…tous les dons que je devine
Viennent à moi sur ces pieds nus!

Si, de tes lèvres avancées,
Tu prépares pour l’apaiser,
À l’habitant de mes pensées
La nourriture d’un baiser,

Ne hâte pas cet acte tendre,
Douceur d’être et de n’être pas,
Car j’ai vécu de vous attendre,
Et mon coeur n’était que vos pas.

2.
Your slow and saintly steps advance
In stillness towards my bed. Awake,
I listen in a kind of trance
To the muted, frozen sounds they make.

O purest person, holy shade,
Your tentative steps are so sweet!
Gods! Every gift you’ve ever made
Comes to me on these naked feet!

If, as your sweet lips advance,
You are prepared to offer bliss
To my starved mind’s inhabitants,
To nourish me with just a kiss,

Don’t hurry us through what we’ll do,
Sweet being and non-being, don’t,
For I’ve lived waiting just for you,
And my heart was your steps alone.

3.
Well, Paul, this verse is nicely turned,
But I’m afraid it isn’t much. In fact,
It’s sort of thin. Yes, you burned
For something vital that you lacked,

And I can understand how you
Might feel so much desire late
At night, alone, and wish it true
That you had brought some sweet, hot date

Whose name, apparently, you don’t
Recall, back home and she had gone
To get some water, check her phone,
Etc. The fact there isn’t one

Detail, however, gives the game
Away. Who is this girl? Is she
For real? Does she have a name?
Does she exist, like you and me?

4.
I guess not. And you say as much.
She’s merely your own heart. Look, I
Know this isn’t fair as such,
And yes, I probably should try

To learn more of your life before
I open fire on the dead,
But honestly, isn’t there more
To love than what’s inside your head

When lying by yourself in bed?
She’s mute and cold, divine and pure?
That’s what you want? It’s what you said.
Seems sort of weird, but you seem sure:

Her steps the children of your silence,
Merely a shadow, merely part
Of you. But doesn’t that do violence
To love? For can love even start,

5.
Much less grow good and strong and real,
Without another person who
You love? Isn’t that the deal?
Isn’t that what we call true,

As opposed to fantasy,
Mere music in the dead of night
When you are all alone and free
To dream up some immortal sprite?

The longing here is lovely, verses turned
Like diamonds, but not good enough.
For in the real world, as I’ve learned,
Deep love burns more like coal. It’s rough.

Fuck dreams. Oh wait, you can’t do that.
Please excuse the witticism,
But in love, this life is where it’s at.
Your purity is narcissism.

6.
I’ve messed up every job I ever had.
Dave, it’s 4am. Just try to sleep.
I tried to help my brother. It’s so sad…
            You did your best. He was a junkie. Sleep…
I couldn’t fix my father.
                                        No one could.
Too much the renegade for higher ed.
The school went broke. My books aren’t…
                                                                        No, they’re good…
Let’s face it, I’ve failed. I’d be better off…
But I love you because you’re kind, she’d say,
And then Just let me hold you. Here. And then
She would and I’d drift off. And in the day
I’d recollect that love, as now, again.
Sometimes I still feel I’ve failed every test
But one: heartbreak. My heart breaks with the best.

As a young man, David J. Rothman was fortunate to study with Mark Strand, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Fitzgerald, among others. He went on to a live a life in poetry, and in 2024 won the Karen Chamberlain Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry in Colorado. His most recent books are a textbook, Learning the Secrets of English Verse (Springer 2022), co-authored with Susan Spear, and My Brother’s Keeper (Lithic 2019), which was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. After many years in Crested Butte and Boulder, he now lives in Salt Lake City.

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John Macker

vernal

my ritual sit, silently between two futon sleeping dogs
blue sky scraped dry by north winds, vernal equinox at
9 p.m. last night, but I didn’t detect a seismic shift in my
methodical ruin
                                a northern flicker blown in today fastidiously
circumnavigates a sumac branch, his theatre of self, a loud klee-yer.
Spring was the only season that could make Persephone blush.
The skinny woman who lives across the street went into detox,
her helicopter pilot neighbor drops in to feed the stricken dogs.

Just beneath the surface the mundane is aflame with tyrannical spirit,
frayed flags and red-eyed sleepless winters
                                                                               we lost our tracks
somewhere concealed under snow, we lost track of
the soul’s resurrected red dusks, our fellow Americans
armed and concealed behind their shiverings⸺

I hope future extra-terrestrials speak Hopi or jazz
follow migrant trails into sweetened by rain ocotillo deserts
or into undersea mouths of speechless volcanos and have
mad visions of peace on earth
                                                        where every track a flower
every flower a cicada song that vanquishes the next
unheard of war, with its cease fires of troubled
sleep while Sandhill cranes lift off the bosque
legs dangling like antennae
high above

our ashes harried by the wind.

***

Corvids

A lone scrub jay breaks the air
over a pot of sagging zinnias,
the tiny Indian Summer suns fill the
disturbed earth with light.
The silence wakens with a start.

I learned corvids have sensory consciousness,
rituals, curiosity, bully pulpits,      but a raven
won’t look at war and wonder, if God finds us
will he desert us?

A raven didn’t fly in just for the countdown
at Trinity Site or to nest in Oppenheimer’s hat.

I look around the sky and cannot imagine a poem
I’d want used to train AI, but in time they’ll
be able to train a crow to vote with its conscience,
I’m sure of it⸺
                         a vote for corvids is a vote for fun.

Today, the world has that omnivorous look in its eye.
Stellar’s jays will never lead a horse to water
but they’ve inhabited my fever dreams, my
aislings, my lullabies for more years than
I can count
                  with their Indian Summer flocks
                          their untrained presences of mind.

***

winter haiku for Annie

waning moon at dawn
feathery logjam of clouds
grey wolf’s river howl

Poet, playwright and essayist John Macker has lived in Northern New Mexico for 28 years. His most recent books of poetry are Belated Mornings; Atlas of Wolves; The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away: Selected Poems 1983-2018 (2019 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards finalist); El Rialto (a memoir); and Desert Threnody, essays and short fiction (a 2021 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards winner for fiction anthology). For several years, he was a contributor to Albuquerque’s Malpais Review. His trilogy of one-act plays, Black Range Trilogy, was produced by Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe in 2023.

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Patricia Dubrava

Tiny Wings

for Kathleen Cain

On a September morning two moths fold
their wings within the front door window curtain.
I place the jar kept for this purpose over them,
one at a time. They obligingly flutter inside
and I take them out to resume their journey
back to Nebraska.

At least, I think that’s where they’re going.
In the spring they migrate through Denver on their way
to the mountains. More go west than return east in the fall,
a routine outcome of the natural world.
 
Being my authority on all questions of the moon,
cottonwood trees, native flora and fauna, Kathleen could
verify this. In a neighborhood meeting on turning
the last farmland into a park, she once asked,
“May I say a few words on behalf of the prairie grasses?”

Kathleen’s in Nebraska now, seeing her baby sister through
to the end, an office older sisters should not hold.
My baby brother, born when I was ten, has been gone
more years than he lived. September’s the birth month
of that skinny child who ran to leap into my arms
when I came home from college.
It is an old sorrow, softened at the edges, tucked away.

Kathleen wipes her sister’s face with a warm cloth,
hugs her, talks to her, in Nebraska, where these moths want to go.
Being there is grief itself but also a blessing. My brother died alone:
that edge of my old sorrow still keen.

When I lift the jar lid, the moths fly out of sight in an instant,
though I marvel at how such tiny wings carry them so far—
so far and back again.

***

For the pretty girl screaming in my alley

You pace south to north, north to south
and I see you from my second story window
in glimpses between garages
but see enough to know your youth,
your slenderness, your long, red-tinted locs
pulled back tight in a high ponytail
that cascades down your back
and sways as you turn.
I see this, pretty girl,
when you pace north and turn south again.
I wouldn’t have seen you at all
were you not screaming into your phone,
causing me to rise from my desk.
At the top of your voice, you yell:
Why do you keep doing this to me?
Why do you keep doing this to me?
You know I love you.
You know I love you.
I hear your words because you repeat
everything half a dozen times
as you turn north or go back south.
I imagine going to the alley, telling you:
before you were born, I was with a man
of whom I asked that question,
over and again:
Why do you keep doing this to me?
Here’s what I know: He won’t change.
Hang up on him, pretty girl.
You could find someone else, someone
you wouldn’t have to scream at while pacing
my alley for forty minutes that seem forever.
But you won’t. I didn’t.
In your froth of hysteria, that’s the last thing
you need—an old white woman
appearing out of nowhere to tell you what to do.
Don’t tell me you don’t care,
don’t tell me you don’t care, 
you scream and I nod—it may be years,
it may be never, until you realize,
this time, this one time,
he’s telling the truth.

***

Artists, Again

for Patti Bippus

On the flat roof the prickle
of sun-struck adobe wall warms my back.
Like the in and out of surf
caressing a pebbled shore,
wind in pines rises and falls,
chorused by Deer Creek’s run
through its elbowed path below.

On the far side of this valley,
aspens wink whitely in morning sun, 
the smoky haze of their bare branches
marking a border between palomino pasture
and green pines climbing upslope.

A gang of ravens gabbles from tree to tree.
In the house, faint ticking of heat registers,
the greedy crackle of fire, and no word spoken
these several sweet hours since breakfast.

You sit at your easel in the sunbathed porch
and I do not look, knowing I would cover
this page should anyone approach,
protecting the fragility of work in progress:
what is not yet owned cannot yet be given.

When I climbed the spiral to the roof,
an angry buzzing increased.
The tower windows were full of flies
hatched from eggs laid in ceiling vigas.
Alarmed at my presence, they swirled
around me till I flung open the rooftop door,
and like so many pent-up ideas,
they burst into the blue.

Patricia Dubrava has two books of poems and one of stories translated from Spanish. She posts shortform creative nonfiction on her blog at www.patriciadubrava.com and Grandmother Poems at https://patriciadubrava.substack.com. Her translations of Mexican fiction have appeared in numerous journals including The Massachusetts Review. Translations of Ukrainian soldier stories appeared on Consequences (June 2023) and Asymptote (July 2023). Her poems appeared most recently in Bristlecone (March and September 2022).

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Suzanne Bassinger

Ode to the Dirt Ditch Irrigator

Yesterday a dry canal.
Today—full-bellied, aching to spill Wyoming
snowmelt over dry Nebraska pastures.

You pay your dues, claim your allotment.
Call the ditchrider to open your headgate.
For two weeks you will move your water
every 8 hours. For two weeks you will walk
your field, shovel on shoulder, boots to thighs,
drag orange tarps and old fenceposts to
make a dam, turn out the flow, walk your field,
find the dry spots, avoid the badger holes that
steal it all, move your water, drag your tarp,
set a dam, shovel a notch, or find last years old one
because you’re tired, it’s late and
in 8 hours you’ll be back to move the water.
To walk your field, set your dam, shovel
a notch, turn out the flow.

For you—the cows low at the fence,
smelling the water, dreaming of grass.

***

You Gave Me Invincible

You armored me with the Carhartt badge worn
by farmers, utility workers, auto mechanics.
I loved the secret lingerie
of the chorus-girl red taffeta lining
whispering as I slipped into
the manliness of faded black-to-gray
rough canvas bib overalls sporting
frayed heels, manure stains, barb-wire
tears from sagging fences.
Loved to clasp your buckles
over my shoulders, pull zipper
from belly to chest, stride
out into the day. Invincible.

I could laugh at negative
Fahrenheit, wind chill warnings, boot-deep snow.
Walk fearless into the February morning
bucking-horse-cold feedings, mid-day negative
Fahrenheit ice-breaking of water troughs,
and then: the evening music
of frost-backed horses nickering
for the chilled grass hay, lots of it,
to stoke their bellies through
the coming bone-cold night.

When it was all done, and ice clung
to my legs as I waded back
to the glowing house, I would unzip
and unbuckle. Smile as black canvas
slipped way to red taffeta.
Stand you frozen-legged over
the heater vent to thaw. To wait to hold me
again tomorrow morning. You gave me
invincible. Indestructible
Lined with chorus girl songs
of red taffeta.

Suzanne Bassinger moved from the New York City area to Colorado as a teenager and fell immediately in love with the west, with wide open spaces, prairie skies, horses and cattle and cowboys and hayfields. Graduating as a civil engineer, her professional career spanned residential and commercial development, water treatment, water rights, and fire recovery. She co-owned a boarding and training stable in Colorado for 10 years then ranched, farmed, and irrigated in western Nebraska for another five years. As a leather worker, she produced a dozen custom saddles, as well as chaps, carved leather work, and horse gear. Poetry is her truest mirror.

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