https://bristleconemag.blogspot.com/2023/01/bristlecone-november-2022.html
Photo by Sandra S. McRae
Poems by
Kathleen Cain, Karen Douglass,Nathan Manley, David Anthony Martin, and Ed McManis
© 2022 Bristlecone
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Bristlecone welcomes poems from writers of the Mountain West region. The editors are especially eager to read poems that reflect the region’s various cultures and landscapes, although we have no restrictions in mind regarding subject matter. Our main concerns are with the quality of the work and the cultivation of a regional community of poets and poetry lovers.
Submissions are accepted year-round. Please adhere to all of the following guidelines:
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The Editors: Joseph Hutchison, Jim Keller, Sandra S. McRae, and Murray Moulding
for Kelly, 1960-2021
It’s important, to find a refuge in every day, so that when you hit the pillow
at night, no matter how troubled you are, you can return there and rejoice a little
in the person, place or thing (though “thing” isn’t really a good word for a poem).
Today it was a natural spring, still present and unexpected, flowing through
a subdivision not far from the hospice house where my sister lies. With warning
signs, of course: Private Property. No Trespassing, blah, blah, blah—it’s only for
us now, not you. But just beneath the place where the sidewalk follows the fence
line, a creek runs away, as they all do if they can. A tangle of trees crosses the water.
The oldest one goes first, a cottonwood, bent like the St. Louis Arch or a bridge
a mother might make of her body, to let her children cross.
My sister needs a bridge like that on her final earth journey, though it’s one she
has to cross alone, as we all do. She just asked what time it is. Ten to eight on Sunday
morning. October third. Canada geese have just made a fly-by, though if she’s heard
them, she doesn’t say. Which is unusual. The declining Moon sailed above the trees
last night, a crystal sickle with gold and silver filigree—you know that way the Moon
does sometimes, in a cold sky. “It’s a gorgeous day,” she says. It’s hard to hear her now,
her always-clear voice reduced to a rasp of air. I put my ear to her lips, ask her, twice more, to tell me again what’s she said. “It’s. A. Gorgeous. Day.” Even as light dims around her, how well she kens the curve of weather, the arc of her life amidst its seasons.
I always hate to see
May go—tulips, iris,
their fragrant parts
disassembling
into fragments of which
they’re made
dropping
folding back into the earth
again, into themselves,
forming next year’s seed
or pod, set to begin
the hubbub of root and bulb
beneath
in their minor tremblings
and yet, the sky clearing
making way for sleepy June
soon the seduction of
mock-orange blossoms
and petal showers
of summer snow—raspberries
already beginning to form
their tart-celled red worlds
on it goes, this continuum
we call life and death
one wrapping and enfolding
the other . . .
and look! golden alyssum’s
last blossom
and here’s
the starred globe
of the purple
Persian
allium—a gazing ball
if ever
there was one
“Ask the wild bees what the Druids knew.”
—Anonymous
Ten years ago, my uncle
the beekeeper
said that “for all intents and purposes
there are no more feral bees.”
Someone in my town posts a picture
of a glut of wild bees in a pine tree
and wonders what to do.
Advice rolls in, with or without
experience or understanding.
“Leave them Alone!”
shouts one. “Call someone to
collect them,” suggests another,
the human impulse to capture
so strong in us. “They’re migrating!”
a third offers, though bees do not
really migrate. For that, they’d need
a destination. And a return. This is
a swarm. They’re just moving house.
They’re gentle then, my uncle always
used to say, easily handled without
fear—all the fuss in honor of
the new queen, whom they will
follow and pledge their lives to.
Yes, leave them. They’ll find their
way, to a hollow log or tree, where
you may or may not notice them as
you walk by, to-ing and fro-ing through
your own day.
It’s hard to tell at first
if the birdsong drifts in from
somewhere over Anderson Cooper’s
right shoulder there in the dark,
from three to four a.m., Ukraine
time; or whether it’s the house finch
in the blue spruce tree outside
the picture window, from six
to seven p.m. Mountain Standard
time here in Colorado. Click off
the volume on the remote. Nothing.
Back on again, just as the finch
lets loose its end-of-day cascade
of notes.
Off. On.
It’s the bird in the dark
in Ukraine, lifting its song before
dawn. Lark? Or thrush? Sounds like
our 4:30 a.m. robins—so, a thrush
then. Whatever species, alive as
the spirit of land and people, its
practiced trill of millennia unerring
there in the dark, certain of the dawn
it can feel, feather and bone. In spite
of everything, singing up the light.
Kathleen Cain's poetry has recently appeared in Abandoned Mine, The Comstock Review, and Pandora’s Amphora (Art Goodtimes’ blog). Work is forthcoming in the premier issue of Jasper’s Folly. She was a featured reader for the Ziggies Zoom reading in April 2022 and for the 100,000 Poets for Change Reading (Denver 2022). She is also the author of two nonfiction books: Luna, Myth and Mystery and The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion. https://kathleencainwriter.com
How near to a moth is god?
A universe of air away,
unless like St. Thomas’s
sponge in the sea I am
in god and god in me
and the moth brushing my hand
closes the gap from maker to made.
Or god is inside the moth
come to test me: can I believe
in a life like my own, veiled
when I thought to swat,
thus murder, a black-winged god?
Escaping a sick world,
I carry silence with me,
hear only birds, sighs
of a passing bike on pavement,
the scuff of my shoes
if I forget to pick up my feet.
I choose one stone as a partner—
oval, black, smooth, palm-sized,
a talisman against the invisible.
I clutch the stone like a gift.
Shaped by long friction
against the elements, it asked
nothing but a resting place, yet
I have wrested it from its home.
We meet no one. The day lengthens.
Wing tangled
in the mesh suet feeder
its furious struggle
to get free
twists the string tighter.
I fetch small scissors, clip
the thread and he’s away,
no thanks or regret.
This small rescue
glitters—
my fingers touching
that delicate wing.
Karen Douglass, BS, MA, MFA, a native New Englander, now lives in Colorado. She has been a psychiatric nurse, horsewoman, racetrack judge, mother (still is), college instructor, poet, and novelist.
Anas platyrhynchos*
For A.G.
By the watchmaker’s motive element
sprung to his afternoon preen, the drake tucks
as innards tick the green enameling
of that faultless, gem-bright head he carries,
bears up like a finery, prinking now
the fan-clasp fold of each ensapphired wing.
I’ve half-discerned his lost mechanic art,
the gear drive’s twinkling teeth and symmetries
of weight and counterpoise, whirr of gilt chains
wheeling—the animal an invention
of Enlightenment clockshops—when it breaks,
this spell that’s held me half an hour, dawdling
at the duckpond, where I conjure the dead—
yes, the never replicated genius
of Vaucanson, that
also of a friend,
who worshipped with a sheepdog’s heart, holding
that the soul takes no form out of nature
but the motion of its fleet machineries.
* The once illustrious, now largely forgotten inventor Jacques de Vaucanson exhibited three automata at a Parisian exhibition in 1738—most famously, a clockwork duck which reproduced mechanically the essential anatomical functions of a living animal, including digestion, for which it was best known. Composed of more than four hundred moving parts, the machine’s intricate design was never documented thoroughly enough to support a modern reconstruction. By the account of one witness, however, the duck appears to have survived at least into the nineteenth century—by then in a sadly degraded condition. His automata astonished Vaucanson’s contemporaries; Voltaire compared the mechanist’s accomplishment to that of Prometheus.
Asio flammeus
“Lamplight lost on the membranous casement,
midnight lapping—soft, osmotic—cat-eyed
at the pane; sickle moon, slick as pooled cream,
cobwebs spun like a needlepoint doily
and catching the spill of it. Throw that latch,
“won’t you? Set a spell while the coyotes yuk,
yuk it up, gleeful, on gore-scrap tatters
and humble kills. Gullyside, sprightly,
sylphs of the May wind finick wild lilac,
tumbling idle-wise, sweet as a porch dream.
“Set still. Prick up your ear, won’t you? Bard-beaked,
freckle-breasted, Brown Owl’s out whoop-whooping
at the wood foot of the tamarack. Why,
the vermin bunch their pretty whiskers, spooked—
Dead Creek bending to its own erasure.
“Old Cricket’s picking at his mandolin,
plumb-tuckered, for the like of us, again:
stickler for struck strings singing out for love
of nothing in particular. Let him.
Hear? The milk-lit lawn’s gone hushabye blue.”
Thamnophis sirtalis
You’ve traveled, cool and mathematical,
up the earth’s hibernal coil, scouring out
a patch of light to warm your sleeping blood.
What meticulous articulation
settled scales in the stonework of your head?
In passing, you’re handsome as a statue,
capable almost of speech, if not guile
to slip the fatal lie by a black lash
of your tongue and unplenty the garden.
And yet, how speechlessly you scent the drift
of our mutual fear, of irises
billowing like tattered ships at the rim
of an alien continent, and flit,
slick as sin where you disappear, dipping
down the terrace with its potted blossoms
and into the yawn of a cracked timber.
To what empty, bestial dreams you’ve dropped
in your world below the world, admitting
no command but that of my enchantment.
One hand’s tensing at the throat of the earth,
where I cannot follow you to your peace.
Chlorophyllum molybdites*
Stain of the ethereal cup no king
since Æthelberht’s drawn a bitter draught of,
toadstools fatten like figs in the forage,
an elfin ring at the tanglewood’s brim.
Pared, pollarded to a diplomacy
of trees, the wild, fine-fruiting, is no more.
Light laps the orchard of a foreign Christ.
Up tumbleweed country, my heritage—
skulls of bison stacked in a parody
of cultic awe—the prairie plaits her locks
with empty ceremony, wind waking
on the neck, yucca-pod stiff.
Even here,
missionaries heard knocks in the dark, ache
of the old religion rankled, wraithlike
in the grass: rattle-scrape of ós and ése.
Sprung dewside of one virgin hill no plow
could scrape to cultivation—this of few,
half-fabled, to weather the oxen yoked
of the Homestead Acts—a fairy’s circling
savagely, calling up her green-gilled shrooms
from an Otherworld isle without a name.
Hers proved a poison, steeped in spleen enough
by nineteen hundred, to open a door
in the backcountry and carry off the child.
* Known also as Green-Spored Lepiota and colloquially as Vomiter, False Parasol is one among a range of fungal species observed to sprout in so-called fairy rings. The organism’s mycelium, of which its mushrooms are the fruiting body, consists of a buried mass of filaments called hyphae; as hyphae decompose organic matter in the soil, aboveground grasses grow lush and vigorously, enriched with nutrients loosed by the fungi’s putrefactive work. This quasi-mutualism results in circles of dark green grass and occasionally, come rainfall, of pale mushroom caps. Fatal poisonings have historically occurred only in children and small animals.
\
Snowshoeing the quiet folds of the forest
down into bobcat draw and up the other side
to the hem of the meadow opening before me
a near blinding expanse of crystalline white
today is a blank slate, surface unmarked but
by wind and sublimation, this sheet of white
pulled taut & tucked into the far scrim of oaks
beneath the cold potential of emptiness rest
the moldering calcium-phosphate rich bones of deer
which now sleeping field mice gnaw
and the fibrous matrix of collagen is devoured
slowly by bacteria and fungi, as she molders
in return to the base elements of the field
from where her nutrition was derived
For a short time, she was the field on four feet
experiencing herself, grazing the green tastes,
solar-powered chlorophyll-infused leaves
of wild grasses busy making sugars to trade
with the penetrating mycelium conveying deep
nutrients from the darkness to shallow roots,
she ground the green to chocolate-dark pellets
The bones: a reminder memento mori
“You, too, shall die.” It is a statement.
An admonition. More wisdom than warning.
Nothing but these beautiful bones remain
the eye finally emptied doorways of perception
cleansed, the skull affixed with the eternal
unhinged grin, a silent, knowing laughter,
a cosmic chuckle of joy
crumbling granite
radiates
smoothened stones
haphazard path of red
rounded pebbles
the ghost of ancestral mountains
long ago eroded
fragmented name
we’ll never know
but still here
somehow
still
falling apart
becoming a part
of everything else
One small point in the flow of my forage
this log-cum-bridge, wet-lapped
tight-grained waterworn heartwood
lacquered slick with unseen life
I know, this creek its width just so
beyond a single stride for me
with my eyes to the far bank, can I navigate
the maneuver, will it support me
just one swift, light boot step
all I ask, not my full weight
as I might ask of a stone
and no longer than a heartbeat
a pivot point, a fulcrum for the swift
compasses of my legs, knowing
there’s a magic to momentum,
to already being in motion—
David Anthony Martin flies kites far too infrequently, forages wild mushrooms when in season, collects feathers when he finds them, writes daily and dreams nightly. He is the author of four collections of poems (Span, Deepening the Map, Bijoux, and The Ground Nest). He works in several capacities for the Nature & Wildlife Discovery Center in Beulah and Pueblo, Colorado, including Environmental Educator, Hike Guide, Park Maintenance, and Caretaker. He is the founding editor of Middle Creek Publishing.
They say the deer creep down at night
from the hills, dainty as ballerinas —
behead the petunias, gladioli.
Cloven hoof-prints mark the congregation,
soft dirt snuffled, a snort rumbling
in the crease of your dreams to wake
you at two a.m. You gaze into the moonlit
garden, tri-horned silhouettes pawing
through the newly planted flower beds,
scattering rosary beads of scat.
A grand plié, now stare away,
now circle beneath your
peach tree, suck the green fruit to pits.
A neighbor’s engine, early shift,
rumbles to life, just over
the velvety lip of the ridge.
Red eyes return your gaze, this family
of rude tourists, their primal indifference
curling your toes as you turn to bow
in your slippered feet, lips sticky-
sealed with peach juice.
The attraction—chemical,
the junkie’s fix, gambler’s dice.
Salivating, you peel
the silver dress
—one was never enough—
work your tongue around
the swirled chocolate nipple
let the melting calm
the sigh, scratch the itch,
then the luxurious
swallow.
You pinch for another and another
working the flimsy foil,
ripcord the paper-thin
hair ribbon—two, three, numbers swirl
—the addition of addiction—
and always a roving eye,
the bag of gold nuggets
the next counter down,
the slivered almond centers
that tempt restraint, make you
believe love is more than dinner
lust or dessert; it’s in your hands
and head as you gnash
your back teeth, melt the
heart within the heart.
The Poem I Didn’t Write…Twenty Years Later
Still offended at all levels, even in translation, hissed
when I proofed, was still politically incorrect,
got cancelled and hash-tagged,
spat graffiti on my computer screen,
had zero metaphors.
It woke me in the middle of the night,
ate its own paws, eyeballed my young, immigrant
neighbor, seduced my wife, lied to my son,
promised me optimism and a jacket cover
as it licked itself, filled out the entry form, sent
a head shot from twelve years ago, signed
my name, was overly nostalgic
for the ole SASE.
The poem I didn’t write won the contest,
squandered the prize money on lesser poets, interns
with big eyes ahead of me in line,
transferred onto an electronic
greeting card that forgot
to recollect itself in tranquility
as it emitted the sour odor of all human
knowledge and thought, didn’t play
tennis or even have a net.
The poem I didn’t write forgot
to turn out the light, let out the cat,
kiss my family goodnight.