%1 http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/ en Jared Smith http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/jared-smith <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Jared Smith</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2019-01-27T17:03:53-07:00" title="Sunday, January 27, 2019 - 17:03" class="datetime">Sun, 01/27/2019 - 17:03</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/jared-smith" data-a2a-title="Jared Smith"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fjared-smith&amp;title=Jared%20Smith"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Jared Smith" src="/sites/default/files/Jared_Smith.jpg" style="width: 500px; height: 653px;" /></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jared Smith is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry. His work has appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies here and abroad. He is Poetry Editor of <em>Turtle Island Quarterly</em> (e-zine,) and has worked on the editorial staff of <em>The New York Quarterly, Home Planet News</em>, and <em>The Pedestal Magazine</em>, as well as serving on the Boards of literary and arts non-profits in New York, Illinois, and Colorado. He is a former Special Appointee at Argonne National Lab, and past advisor to several White House Commissions under President William Clinton. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Poems</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>He Does What It Takes<br />&#13; Curling his fingers around porcelain<br />&#13; he cradles the morning cup of coffee and watches<br />&#13; steam rise between his fingers, how each finger<br />&#13; shapes the fog of morning with his unique mark,<br />&#13; his DNA and his fingerprints upon the swirl of time,<br />&#13; and he listens to the tick of the clock upon his wall,<br />&#13; the first birds beginning to sing in his garden,<br />&#13; and a dog startled by dawn down the street,<br />&#13; the morning paper hitting with a thud at his door.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This is what the man is before he goes out<br />&#13; to turn the ignition in his family car.  It is what<br />&#13; his wife thought of before she thought of diamonds<br />&#13; and before there were other souls beneath this roof.<br />&#13; It is the little things that make the man what he is,<br />&#13; the scent of his chemical balances, the colors he sees<br />&#13; as sun rises over the blasted buildings of his city,<br />&#13; the tiniest bits of the universe that have come to him<br />&#13; and pulled together to be unique in all of time.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This is what he is, and he goes out each morning<br />&#13; to do what the machine asks and comes back each night.<br />&#13; At night the crickets are calling to the darkness and light<br />&#13; within him, and the hum of commerce fills his veins.<br />&#13; He whispers of love with each breath he takes.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From the book <em>Shadows Within the Roaring Fork</em> (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>What We Don’t Talk Of</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Our language is one forged from<br />&#13; fists slammed down on desks,<br />&#13; from Teutonic storage bins forged<br />&#13; from fire for cold steel weaponry.<br />&#13; It is a scaffolding for science<br />&#13; measured and contained too small;<br />&#13; a brittle thing matching the metal<br />&#13; that places fences in our pockets.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Our language does not understand<br />&#13; nor have words for sunrise coating<br />&#13; and enmeshing autumn grains<br />&#13; growing where water meets the land.<br />&#13; It does not understand the lightness<br />&#13; filling the dark between trees at night.<br />&#13; The wind moves between its words<br />&#13; as though they were but dried shells.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Our language but mimics the eyes<br />&#13; of fox stealing the eggs from chicks<br />&#13; or taking meat home for the pups.<br />&#13; Our syllables get caught in its fur<br />&#13; and brushed out by brambles<br />&#13; scattered to fleshless tangles of rage.<br />&#13; Our language is one of frustration,<br />&#13; unable and unwilling to be flexible,<br />&#13; unwilling to listen to the words<br />&#13; of welcome that come from your lips,<br />&#13; unwilling to forgive what it does not know.</p>&#13; &#13; <p><a name="_Hlk504893066" id="_Hlk504893066">From <em>To The Dark Angels</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2015)</a></p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Shadows Within The Roaring Fork</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>The river looks the same as it did<br />&#13; an hour ago, this river that is not a big river<br />&#13; but one you could jump halfway over<br />&#13; one <strong>sage brush</strong> bank to the other almost,<br />&#13; nothing like the Big Muddy or even The Hudson,<br />&#13; not <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-river">The Colorado</a></strong> even but still<br />&#13; with the sun hitting down upon its rapids<br />&#13; and spring flush rolling boulders downstream,<br />&#13; with the few shade trees above it in wind<br />&#13; it looks the same river it was yesterday,<br />&#13; a singular presence, an eel chasing its tail<br />&#13; under salt-slicked roadways and arches.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>But this is the time of year when most<br />&#13; it changes and the insects hatched upon its surface<br />&#13; are swirled down and kegs of stone roll along<br />&#13; its bed and the minerals giving it its colors<br />&#13; seep into its passage, the fox that dipped its paws,<br />&#13; the <strong>bear</strong> way upstream that dragged across it<br />&#13; washing the heavy musk of winter in its spume,<br />&#13; have all been taken in its solvent, been drunken deeply<br />&#13; and washed away tasting as nothing but water<br />&#13; in this clearest of mountain rivers erasing it seems<br />&#13; everything and taking it all away within it,<br />&#13; ever changing and taking everything down,<br />&#13; each hoof print, each piece of whitened skull,<br />&#13; each reflection of the moon and the stars,<br />&#13; though it looks the same as it always did.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From far above one day into the next the same,<br />&#13; from up close pressed against your lips, drawn in<br />&#13; from one day into the next it tastes the same purity<br />&#13; of snow that inhabits the highest mountains<br />&#13; having taken all the dust and debris to itself,<br />&#13; roaring that old adage that nothing lasts forever<br />&#13; and even the continents will be washed away.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>And perhaps it’s so, perhaps the weight<br />&#13; of so many years and souls and dreams<br />&#13; will wash down with the rusted nails<br />&#13; and the broken concrete shells of men,<br />&#13; but entering into that river there are shapes,<br />&#13; are shadows lurking, holding their own<br />&#13; finning the graveling beds, watching,<br />&#13; taking all that debris inside and breathing,<br />&#13; moving independent of the current,|<br />&#13; causing change and setting red suns to burn<br />&#13; in places men have not yet gone nor seen.<br />&#13; And these elusive shadows, they change the river as well<br />&#13; filling its waters with the scent and sense of life.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From <em>Shadows Within The Roaring Fork</em> (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017<strong>)</strong></p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Soaring on the Tectonic Waves of Time</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>A hawk folds itself into the updrafts atop <strong>Green Mountain</strong>,<br />&#13; its eyes now a part of the wind and the rock from which it came,<br />&#13; and in that instant it becomes itself the wind with a mind in time…<br />&#13; slow moving as it settles its way in circles down toward the earth again.<br />&#13; The light in its eye reflects the sage dry hills, the huckleberries’ red blood,<br />&#13; the glass of family homes outside <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/boulder">Boulder</a></strong>, the sun coming back.  It is<br />&#13; a gliding between facets of time traveled across multiple universes,<br />&#13; These mountains are the slow-moving tectonic waves of time<br />&#13; tumbling over each other, wind whipping off the froth, sand shifting<br />&#13; and pulling away at the roots of whatever grows, but at a speed we<br />&#13; live almost outside of except for instants like these when we sit<br />&#13; on our porch watching out over the western ranges peak beyond peak<br />&#13; and shadows flow across evening canyons, shifting shapes so I rise<br />&#13; from the land, seeing from outside my body the rocks and trees grow small,<br />&#13; hovering with my shoulders against them turning back the tide not at all<br />&#13; but feeling the physics that set us all in motion in distant galaxies so long ago.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>We start then with muses, as Hesiod wrote, telling of things that are,<br />&#13; that will be and that were with voices joined in harmony, and we partake<br />&#13; of shadow and of <em>eidos</em> in ways that are outside the neurons of our minds.<br />&#13; A mountain is a fabric and a wrinkle in the text of time, and is but one muse,<br />&#13; the city at its feet is another, in a concurrent folding of the fabric.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From <em>Grassroots</em> (Wind Publications, 2010)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>It Happens Right Here in Loveland, Colorado<br />&#13; at the G&amp;W Sugar Beet Field Processing Plant </h3>&#13; &#13; <p>There is something sweet and hard in all men<br />&#13; and it is drawn out in our industry from the hard, dry ground,<br />&#13; It is drawn out and distilled from our sorrows and our struggles<br />&#13; from working together with our minds and our backs and our hands.<br />&#13; It is something at the center of our being, of our reality.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>I think of it this time of year, walking knee-deep in the harvest fields<br />&#13; as the days grow shorter and the temperature begins to fall.  We gather,<br />&#13; we neighbors who oversee the farmland, and the migrants, and the scientists too,<br />&#13; and the engineers who build factories and railroads and boxcars filled with night—<br />&#13; all looking for something sweet and meaningful at the center of our being.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>We work together as we move through life,<br />&#13; and some of us walk out into the field as I do, and swing knives and tools<br />&#13; to shred the dark earth tubers that lie beneath us having drawn life<br />&#13; from the sand and water that lie along the banks of the <strong>Big Thompson</strong>,<br />&#13; within <strong>Loveland</strong>, we walk the fields rooting out rock hard fruits of labor<br />&#13; row upon row of men and women walking the fields in autumn<br />&#13; ripping these <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/sugar-beet-industry">beets</a></strong> from the earth, collecting them in piles by the roads,<br />&#13; gathering them for processing and refinement, beating down these rock- hard<br />&#13;    stones that no man might have thought to eat<br />&#13; but are the transition zone between desert and mountain, arid and water,<br />&#13; where we learn to turn our sorrow into the sweet crystals of man’s soul.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>We do this every year.  We pull the tubers from the soil.<br />&#13; We haul them off the field.  We cut off the leaves that bring them sun,<br />&#13; and we shake the earth from them.  We haul these gray slabs across the furrows<br />&#13; of the earth and pile them up for cars built in Detroit and trains built in Pennsylvania,<br />&#13; and we all work together having come from Russia and England and New York<br />&#13; and having worked the fields in Mexico and foundries in Chicago,<br />&#13; we come together in this rush of autumn humanity searching for something<br />&#13; that will enrich and sweeten the heart of our days in Loveland, Colorado.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>We haul these gray tubers away into the dark bins of our days, but we<br />&#13; work with them, we refine them, we cut deeply into what they grew from,<br />&#13; we lay them out, grate them down, distill their juices.  We do this together:<br />&#13; laborers, scientists, financial wizards who build steel and concrete monuments,<br />&#13; sweating together to find something clear and sweet within the darkest earth.<br />&#13; And here we see it, in this vacuum pan chamber where everything distills<br />&#13;           like poetry<br />&#13; we see that crystal clear nugget that is at the core of every child’s dream,<br />&#13; something sweet to hang the dreams of a lifetime on where something sweet<br />&#13; comes from the hardest work that every kind of man and woman can do<br />&#13; working together in the seeding, planting, growing, and harvesting of seasons.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From <em>Shadows Within The Roaring Fork</em> (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>The City Within the City</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>is within the darkest brick alleyways<br />&#13; at the far end, over the cobblestones<br />&#13; behind the greyest most modest wall<br />&#13; where when the doors open chandeliers<br />&#13; (cut glass from the hard hands of Tiffany)<br />&#13; shaken by Brahms and Mozart notes,<br />&#13; where shadowed men speak in whispers|<br />&#13; slurring their words in aged whiskey or<br />&#13; rolling their vowels in brandy snifters<br />&#13; come together in every city nameless.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>It is a place where Roman Cardinals<br />&#13; take off their shoes, turn water into wine<br />&#13; and pass bread among poor fishermen,<br />&#13; a place where Rothschilds sew buttons<br />&#13; onto the very fabric of industrial society,<br />&#13; knowing what seam clothes the factories,<br />&#13; what clothes the university professors,<br />&#13; and where the owners of the deepest mines<br />&#13; crush the land itself into the finest jewels.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>It is a place linked by placelessness,<br />&#13; stretching across one continent to another<br />&#13; identified most by the silence of <em>gravitas</em>,<br />&#13; the number of communication lines run in,<br />&#13; the generations that have grown in-bred<br />&#13; that own the media that no one writes of,<br />&#13; that is the heartbeat that fills our lives.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Found almost always where least expected<br />&#13; it wears the dappled camouflage of soldiers<br />&#13; who have enlisted on the wings of angels,<br />&#13; and its music, its heady perfumes, baubles,<br />&#13; metaphysical incantations, whispered siren songs<br />&#13; are the darkest deepest richest fabric woven<br />&#13; in the city within the city within our home.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From <em>Shadows Within The Roaring Fork</em> (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Deep in the Convenience Store</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>A man buys two pens<br />&#13;     and puts them in his pocket<br />&#13; in the convenience store<br />&#13; the cash register accounts for two pens<br />&#13;    as two wide angle cameras take him in<br />&#13; side the cameras four more pens<br />&#13; click into the man’s pockets<br />&#13; and the bar code reader sends data<br />&#13; while the parking lot camera scans two pens<br />&#13; clipped onto a sweat stained shirt, and<br />&#13; by the time he gets home 18 pens<br />&#13; bulge in his pocket, closing him in<br />&#13; while computers trace two pens back<br />&#13; to an assembly line in eastern Asia<br />&#13; where caps are placed on these things</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The man lies awake all night.  His pens become immense and<br />&#13; do not have enough ink to write poems of the people he has touched.<br />&#13; His pens have meant more to people than all the poems he writes.<br />&#13; He knows his pens are filled with hungry haunted nightmares.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From <em>Shadows Within The Roaring Fork</em> (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>That’s How It Is</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Sunrise finds the New York shopkeepers rolling up their windows<br />&#13; dusting off the counters sweeping the floors shoveling their walkways<br />&#13; pulling pastries from dry hot ovens filling coffee pots to get the morning going<br />&#13; for the secretaries and executives and lawyers bankers insurance salesmen clerks<br />&#13; and the homeless too coming in quietly with their handfuls of fear and empty bellies<br />&#13; because it’s another day, and the workers do what workers do every blessed day<br />&#13; not too aware of what they do or whom they serve but it’s morning and they rise</p>&#13; &#13; <p>and sunrise is indifferent as the clouds and passes on to Pennsylvania<br />&#13; and it reflects redness of the empty steel mills and foundries<br />&#13; where again the shopkeepers rise and here the miners line up for unemployment<br />&#13; or the lucky ones still go down into the darkness of the earth with fear in their hearts<br />&#13; and fishermen line up on the banks of the Alleghany with their thermoses<br />&#13; and a gum chewing girl from a diner clears egg-smeared plates from tables<br />&#13; watching the traffic that never ends go by along the interstate a seamless zipper</p>&#13; &#13; <p>and sunrise hurries on its way out across the freighters on Lake Michigan<br />&#13; and the commodity traders working screaming toward heart attacks in Chicago<br />&#13; the endowed institutions of learning that line our cities the students half asleep<br />&#13; out over the heartland where the grain still grows so high it never touches ground<br />&#13; and on out over eastern and then western Kansas where the aquifers are drying<br />&#13; and the promise of America’s breadbasket is starting to grow thin</p>&#13; &#13; <p>it moves on across the mountains of Colorado, hiding itself in valleys<br />&#13; and pointing out the oil well and ore dumps and abandoned ghost towns<br />&#13; the rusting scaffolding of the <strong>Roan Plateau</strong> the toxic sumps of <strong>Climax</strong><br />&#13; and the shopkeepers rising to open their shops for the clerks and lawyers<br />&#13; ranchers driving their herds to the high country or to the low country<br />&#13;                                   depending on the season<br />&#13; it changes but sunrise moves across it and as always work begins<br />&#13; and sunrise has no mind no consciousness of the shadows growing<br />&#13; and of how the same work has to start and be filled each day or<br />&#13; of the darkness that follows only hours behind and the light<br />&#13; behind that the tired muscles in a man’s arms the panic<br />&#13; at the morning table when the bills come out<br />&#13; the liquor sparkling in taverns after the day is gone<br />&#13; shimmering in the folks of evening gowns but<br />&#13; it moves on without reference to the thoughts of workers<br />&#13; sunrise brightens up the sands of Vegas and the roulette tables<br />&#13; the hookers high-rollers and papers in the gutters along the strip<br />&#13; the hangovers and empty wallets left over from the night before<br />&#13; and the shop owners the police the judges putting on their pants<br />&#13; the hotel windows glinting back a desert sandscape to the sky</p>&#13; &#13; <p>but it moves on and peaks upon the Hollywood sign and the<br />&#13; cougar living in those hills and the movie makers making reality<br />&#13; and flattens out over the iron endless gray of the Pacific<br />&#13; but even as the surf is up off California it is growing darker<br />&#13; to the east and the day is as long as the motions we all go through.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From <em>To The Dark Angels </em>(New York Quarterly Books, 2015)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Love in Quantum Field Theory</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>I am awake with the mountain cats,<br />&#13; perturbations in the shadows of nothingness.<br />&#13; There are four fields in quantum theory,<br />&#13; open flowings without fences,<br />&#13; dimpled with the circles of disruption<br />&#13; splashed from infinite possibilities on themselves,<br />&#13; of those things that go through a cat’s eye<br />&#13; and are the eye of the dark cat beyond night,<br />&#13; night- light within the beginning of all things.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>We circle around upon through each other, bosons,<br />&#13; each dimpled ripple seeking something in the curve<br />&#13; that entwined without mind in the dimpled curve<br />&#13; is sensed most perfectly as being what we need<br />&#13; as things that have no needs beyond ourselves.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>And I don’t know now as dusk settles time space<br />&#13; like a liquid crystal cat display in window glass<br />&#13; what gravity this has that causes the fields<br />&#13; to feed upon themselves, to flow between<br />&#13; the stones that are the field or the flesh.<br />&#13; Perhaps a field out beyond the fences built<br />&#13; will be found to flow between the currents<br />&#13; ebbing forever in the tidal flow.  Perhaps</p>&#13; &#13; <p>there is nothing that can disrupt field theory<br />&#13; dimpling on itself except some other force<br />&#13; where life finds life within each other<br />&#13; creating not another like itself but life<br />&#13; creating what no other force can feel or be,<br />&#13; switching back and forth a lover’s lazy gaze<br />&#13; sinuous as the dreams of anything, falling<br />&#13; through everything with the weight of life<br />&#13; lost in the majesty of mindless certainty.<br />&#13; Appearing.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From <em>Shadows Within The Roaring Fork</em> (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Lake Peterson</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>This is a small lake but deep,<br />&#13; nestled in the throat of a volcano<br />&#13; surrounded by miles of <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/moose">moose</a></strong> and <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/rocky-mountain-elk">elk</a></strong><br />&#13; foraging their ways among <strong>aspen</strong> and <strong>fir</strong>,<br />&#13; the chuckling of martens and porcupines,<br />&#13; the silence of Colorado coyotes at dusk.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>A sunset brightening horizon fills this lake<br />&#13; as it fills the sleek bellies of <strong>trout</strong> down<br />&#13;    in their darkness<br />&#13; with eyes that perceive what cannot be<br />&#13;          spoken,<br />&#13; what cannot be shared across flesh.<br />&#13; And the wind which passes among pines<br />&#13; moves across this lake without moving it,<br />&#13; meaning that small waves dance in place<br />&#13; where shore meets land again and again,<br />&#13;  almost as on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean<br />&#13; except there are fewer people here<br />&#13; and there are no billboards, no road.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This is a small lake that matters little<br />&#13; where an eco-system of life encompasses<br />&#13; little meaning on the edge of infinity,<br />&#13; and the sun is its reflected surface<br />&#13; and its voiceless denizens are dark<br />&#13; with the bright colors of stars on their skin,<br />&#13; and the voice and temperature of the earth<br />&#13; funneled deep into its concave infinite depth.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From <em>To the Dark Angels</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2015)</p>&#13; &#13; <p>All poems are opyright 2018 by Jared Smith</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/social-studies" hreflang="en">Social Studies</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a 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http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Wendy Videlock http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/wendy-videlock <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Wendy Videlock </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 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addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/wendy-videlock" data-a2a-title="Wendy Videlock "><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fwendy-videlock&amp;title=Wendy%20Videlock%20"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><div>&#13; <p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Wendy Videlock" src="/sites/default/files/Wendy_Videlock.jpg" style="width: 392px; height: 481px;" /></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Wendy Videlock is a writer, visual artist, teacher, and a life-long student of the world. She lives on the <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/western-slope">Western Slope</a></strong> of Colorado in <strong>Palisade</strong>. Her books include <em>Nevertheless </em>(San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2011)<em>, Slingshots &amp; Love Plums </em>(San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2015)<em>, The Dark Gnu </em>(San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2013), and a chapbook, <em>What</em><em>’</em><em>s That Supposed to Mean</em> (New York, NY: EXOT Books, 2010).</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Poems</h2>&#13; &#13; <div>&#13; <h3>The Chameleon’s Eye</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>The course of evolution is the story of the soul.<br />&#13;  — CM</p>&#13; &#13; <p>We begin with the chameleon’s eye<br />&#13; or perhaps with a war, and a little girl,<br />&#13; or a single cell, or a single thought,<br />&#13; floating about in a murky and<br />&#13; primordial world.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Let us begin again:<br />&#13; a murky and primordial world<br />&#13; is nonetheless wrought with stars,<br />&#13; turns the old chameleon’s eye,<br />&#13; emboldens the soul,<br />&#13; floating about in a murky and<br />&#13; primordial world.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Trapped like a fish, the soul insists:<br />&#13; thrashing about, floating in,<br />&#13; or clear as a clam in a freshwater pool,<br />&#13; it hardly matters why<br />&#13; or when.  Let us begin again.</p>&#13; </div>&#13; &#13; <div>&#13; <h3>I Have been Counting My Regrets:</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Bacon, Facebook, cigarettes.  <br />&#13; Anger.  <br />&#13; Bluster. <br />&#13; Laziness.  </p>&#13; &#13; <p>Fearfulness. Indifference.    <br />&#13; Lousy lovers, stupid bets.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Things that should not be confessed. <br />&#13; I’m still not dead.  </p>&#13; &#13; <p>It should be said</p>&#13; &#13; <p>I haven’t finished counting yet.  </p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Rattle</em></p>&#13; </div>&#13; &#13; <div>&#13; <h3>Cicada Methuselah Clan</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Underground<br />&#13; they carry on,<br />&#13; but there is sound,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>there’s even song<br />&#13; that carries on<br />&#13; underground.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>It is the sound<br />&#13; of weightedness,<br />&#13; of being bound,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>of bending roots<br />&#13; and being ground<br />&#13; in dark perceptions</p>&#13; &#13; <p>to the sound<br />&#13; of small mouths sipping<br />&#13; underground.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>The Lyric</em></p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Ode to the Slow</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>I’ve an affinity for ghosts, and so,<br />&#13; dwelling as we ghostly do, with the caw<br />&#13; and the hoo and the pinyon moon, where the freeze</p>&#13; &#13; <p>and the thaw and the witness are<br />&#13; together alive and together entombed,<br />&#13; here on the edge of the high desert world</p>&#13; &#13; <p>where all is stone and all is sky,<br />&#13; where an ancient sea was driven forth<br />&#13; to slowly die, here where the ruins and the peaks</p>&#13; &#13; <p>have changed their names to bluff and butte,<br />&#13; here where the <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/search/google/ute">Ute</a></strong> had slowed their pace<br />&#13; to warm their bones and slake the thirst,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>here where the reach of the canyon ends<br />&#13; or begins, as it were —like knowledge, it’s always<br />&#13; a rapture or a bit of a blur— (one could soar on the wing</p>&#13; &#13; <p>or tumble in) here where the rolling stone knows<br />&#13; the floor is only made of sand, and the arc<br />&#13; is the mark of the fallen star, </p>&#13; &#13; <p>here where the ghosts and the slopes are wan<br />&#13; and empty of virtue and of sin, I lower a bridge,<br />&#13; and watch the morning fog roll in.  </p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Said the Sculptor</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Given a freak of vision<br />&#13; and precision</p>&#13; &#13; <p>a person can chip away at a thing<br />&#13; revealing the shape<br />&#13; that lies within:<br />&#13; Pallas Athena, The Thinker,<br />&#13; The Kiss,<br />&#13; The Griffin’s Wing.<br />&#13; Given the inexplicable itch<br />&#13; to chip and chip<br />&#13; away at things, it’s wise to recall<br />&#13; one can also end up<br />&#13; with nothing at all.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Nevertheless</em> (San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2011).</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>The Skin of the Boy who Changed his Destiny</h3>&#13; &#13; <p> — for Sherman Alexie​</p>&#13; &#13; <p>A child is born unto this world.<br />&#13; He brings with him<br />&#13; the skin that has been given him,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>the load that has been shifted to him,<br />&#13; and the gift that has been offered him.<br />&#13; From these things the child forms </p>&#13; &#13; <p>early on, a secret code,<br />&#13; that might in fact be better known<br />&#13; as salmon, or bear, or prayer,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>or perhaps a kind of living law. <br />&#13; Heredity claims the shape of the jaw.<br />&#13; Geography shapes the palm of the hand.  </p>&#13; &#13; <p>The dying of the mother tongue<br />&#13; punctuates the northern star,<br />&#13; while all powerful Destiny</p>&#13; &#13; <p>stands in the wings, in awe. <br />&#13; It has been said that all laboring<br />&#13; in service of soul</p>&#13; &#13; <p>is done in the dark,<br />&#13; that nothing’s truer than the autumn leaf,<br />&#13; and the life of the mind</p>&#13; &#13; <p>is best described<br />&#13; as a kind of collective dream.  The skin<br />&#13; of the boy who changed his destiny</p>&#13; &#13; <p>is mottled as the moth, is storied<br />&#13; as the mother tree, and bears the mark<br />&#13; of violence and legacy,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>of tenderness, and melody,<br />&#13; where gift and load and forgiveness form<br />&#13; with destiny,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>a certain solidarity,<br />&#13; and the closest the gifted child comes<br />&#13; to medicine, or remedy. </p>&#13; &#13; <h3><strong>Deconstruction</strong></h3>&#13; &#13; <p>The chickadee is all about truth<br />&#13; The finch is a token. The albatross<br />&#13; is always an omen. The kestrel is mental,<br />&#13; the lark is luck, the grouse is dance,<br />&#13; the goose is quest.  The need for speed<br />&#13; is given the peregrine, and the dove’s<br />&#13; been blessed with the feminine. </p>&#13; &#13; <p>The quail is word, and culpability. <br />&#13; The crane is the dean of poetry.<br />&#13; The swift is the means to agility,<br />&#13; the waxwing mere civility,<br />&#13; the sparrow a nod to working class</p>&#13; &#13; <p>nobility.  The puffin’s the brother<br />&#13; of laughter, and prayer, the starling the student<br />&#13; of Baudelaire. The mockingbird<br />&#13; is the sound of redress, the grackle the uncle<br />&#13; of excess. The flicker is rhythm,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>the ostrich is earth, the bluebird a simple<br />&#13; symbol of mirth. The oriole<br />&#13; is the fresh start. The magpie prince<br />&#13; of the dark arts. The swallow is home<br />&#13; and protection -- the vulture the priest</p>&#13; &#13; <p>of purification, the heron a font<br />&#13; of self-reflection.  The swisher belongs<br />&#13; to the faery realm. Resourcefulness<br />&#13; is the cactus wren.  The pheasant is sex,<br />&#13; the chicken is egg, the eagle is free,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>the canary the bringer of ecstasy.<br />&#13; The martin is peace.  The stork is release.<br />&#13; The swan is the mother of cool discretion. <br />&#13; The loon is the watery voice of the moon. <br />&#13; The owl’s the keeper of secrets, grief,<br />&#13; and fresh fallen snow, and the crow<br />&#13; has the bones of the ancestral soul.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Hudson Review</em> and reprinted in <em>Best American Poetry</em></p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Merchant Culture</h3>&#13; &#13; <p><em>What</em><em>’</em><em>s the going rate for a poem these days? </em><br />&#13; — Jack Mueller</p>&#13; &#13; <p>I’ll trade you a drop of snow</p>&#13; &#13; <p>for a lyrical poem,<br />&#13; a parking lot for a muffled moan,<br />&#13; the justice card<br />&#13; for the nine of swords<br />&#13; a soldier’s heart<br />&#13; for a kettle of gold<br />&#13; a kindly verb<br />&#13; for the face of your lord,<br />&#13; a Persian word for an off<br />&#13; chord,<br />&#13; a thousand tears,<br />&#13; a million tomes,<br />&#13; a drop of snow<br />&#13; for a lyrical poem.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Rattle</em></p>&#13; &#13; <h3>What You’ve Been Given</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Here lie the things you have been given:<br />&#13; the unabridged and the riven,<br />&#13; the easy breeze, the unforgiven,<br />&#13; the throw-away, the hard wrought,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>the speed rail, the train of thought,<br />&#13; the all is calm and all is not,<br />&#13; the darkest spark, the clearest bead,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>the soft shoe, the stampede,<br />&#13; the germ of greed, the store of thanks,<br />&#13; the standard flaw, the saving grace,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>the perfect night, the wanting dawn,<br />&#13; the white noise, the black swan,<br />&#13; the aria, the mad song.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Do thy best. <br />&#13; Pass it on.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Hudson Review</em></p>&#13; &#13; <h3>A Lizard in Spanish Valley</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>A lizard does not make a sound,<br />&#13; it has no song,<br />&#13; it does not share my love affairs<br />&#13; with flannel sheets,<br />&#13; bearded men, interlocking<br />&#13; silver rings, the moon,<br />&#13; the sea, or ink.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>But sitting here the afternoon,<br />&#13; I’ve come to believe<br />&#13; we do share a love affair<br />&#13; and a belief —<br />&#13; in wink, blink, stone,<br />&#13; and heat.<br />&#13; Also, air.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This is not a fable,<br />&#13; nor is it bliss.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Impatience,<br />&#13; remember this.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Poetry</em> magazine</p>&#13; </div>&#13; </div>&#13; &#13; <p> All poems are Copyright 2018</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/science" hreflang="en">science</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/social-studies" hreflang="en">Social Studies</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/social-media" hreflang="en">Social Media</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sociology" hreflang="en">Sociology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/biology" hreflang="en">Biology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/language-arts" hreflang="en">Language Arts</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/dimeters" hreflang="en">Dimeters</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-history" hreflang="en">colorado history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/geography" hreflang="en">Geography</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/san-luis-valley" hreflang="en">San Luis Valley</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/visual-art" hreflang="en">Visual Art</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sculpture" hreflang="en">Sculpture</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/art-history" hreflang="en">Art History</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/art" hreflang="en">Art</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/psychology" hreflang="en">Psychology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/tetrameters" hreflang="en">Tetrameters</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> Sun, 27 Jan 2019 22:25:29 +0000 yongli 3032 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Beth Paulson http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/beth-paulson <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Beth Paulson</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 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'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2019-01-24T15:16:16-07:00" title="Thursday, January 24, 2019 - 15:16" class="datetime">Thu, 01/24/2019 - 15:16</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/beth-paulson" data-a2a-title="Beth Paulson"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fbeth-paulson&amp;title=Beth%20Paulson"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Beth Paulson" src="/sites/default/files/Beth_Paulson.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 453px;" /></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Beth Paulson lives in <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/ouray-county">Ouray County</a></strong>, Colorado where she teaches workshops, leads Poetica, a monthly workshop for area writers, and co-directs the Open Bard Poetry Series.  She formerly taught English at California State University Los Angeles for twenty-two years. Her poems have been published nationally in over 200 journals and anthologies and have four times been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Beth’s fifth collection of poems, <em>Immensity</em>, was published in 2016 by Kelsay Books. Her website is <a href="https://wordcatcher.org/">www.wordcatcher.org</a>.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Poems</h2>&#13; &#13; <h3>Kites</h3>&#13; &#13; <p><em>Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world</em>.  <em>Edna St. Vincent Millay<br />&#13; You were born with wings.  Jalal-al-din-Rumi</em></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Diamond of rainbow cloth, bent sticks<br />&#13; tail of ribbon trails behind,<br />&#13; all it does is scud along</p>&#13; &#13; <p>unwinding its fat ball of string<br />&#13; while spring blows steady in our faces<br />&#13; park grass under us a sea</p>&#13; &#13; <p>we run through, arms outstretched<br />&#13; like these blackbirds looping near<br />&#13; with their capable, unerring wings.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Suddenly it wheels and dives,<br />&#13; then climbs into the cloud-streaked sky:<br />&#13; a silk-clad jockey riding fast</p>&#13; &#13; <p>or dancer costumed in bright sari?<br />&#13; Borne by gusts it rises high,<br />&#13; so much smaller far away</p>&#13; &#13; <p>from us, feet tethered to the earth,<br />&#13; eyes looking up to marvel at:<br />&#13; does a kite strain to be free?</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Sometimes the string you hold breaks<br />&#13; and there’s nothing you can do.<br />&#13; Sometimes people just leave you.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>How tenuous are all connections:<br />&#13; we are, far as we can see,<br />&#13; just holding on at wind’s mercy.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Cloudbank </em>(journal of contemporary writing). Also appears in <em>Canyon Notes </em>(Ridgway, CO: Mt. Sneffels Press, 2012).</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Seventeen Ways of Saying Rain</h3>&#13; &#13; <p><em>In the Japanese language, there are seventeen words for rain. </em>Dianne Ackerman</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Rain that makes the yellow leaves fall, rain that drips from a downspout into the mint patch, rain that beats a tattoo on the metal roof, rain that soaks through a waterproof jacket, rain that hangs like small pearls on spruce branches, rain that turns river water to café au lait, rain that collects on the backs of black and white cows, rain on marsh marigolds that was snow yesterday, rain that rolls rocks down onto a mountain pass, rain that makes dust puffs rise from dry earth, rain that shines through July afternoon sunlight,  rain that smells of wood stacks and wood smoke,  rain that hisses on asphalt under truck wheels, rain that unearths mushrooms in the forest , rain that paints deep red the sandstone cliffs, rain that bends down the faces of sunflowers, rain that mingles with tears.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Mountain Gazette </em>(2016). Also appears in <em>Immensity</em> (Kelsay Books, 2016).</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>The Color of Snow</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Vermeer asked the maid<br /><em>What color are clouds?</em><br />&#13; and he wouldn’t take white<br />&#13; for an answer. She looked<br />&#13; hard at the Delft sky<br />&#13; then, slow, replied<br /><em>yellow</em> and <em>green</em>….<em>red</em>!</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In snow I see red, too,<br />&#13; on my way down Miller Mesa.<br />&#13; I’ve been snowshoeing,<br />&#13; soft slapping and crunching<br />&#13; what’s new fallen,<br />&#13; all afternoon following<br />&#13; winter-transformed trails<br />&#13; through untouched meadows,<br />&#13; hushed forest of laden pines<br />&#13; and naked aspens, leaving<br />&#13; a giant’s deep tracks.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Now the sky’s lavender<br />&#13; and the distant peaks<br />&#13; I try to name violet<br />&#13; as late sun paints shadows<br />&#13; on boulders and drifts,<br />&#13; broad brushstrokes<br />&#13; over a canvas of foothills,<br />&#13; sometimes blue and <em>yes</em> green.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>The Aurorean</em> (2008) and nominated for 2009 Pushcart Prize. Also appears in <em>Wild Raspberries </em>(Austin, TX: Plainview Press, 2009)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>All or Nothing</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Nothing will do but to admit             <br />&#13; there is a lot of you, nothing,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>expanding, curving, exploding, birthing<br />&#13; throughout the universe, without ceasing,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>shape shifter with no mass or charge--<br />&#13; there is just no way to measure you.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Big zero. Nil. Nada.<br />&#13; Our best thinkers can’t detect you</p>&#13; &#13; <p>but only suspect you are behind        <br />&#13; every insect wing, giant redwood,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>fiery star and human being,               <br />&#13; lurking between every atom,                                   </p>&#13; &#13; <p>holding together everything that exists.<br />&#13; Before Einstein you were named</p>&#13; &#13; <p><em>Ether</em> and <em>Vacuum</em><br />&#13; but some now say you are eleven strings</p>&#13; &#13; <p>of nothing (or maybe shards of subatomic particles).<br />&#13; I think I’ll call you <em>invisible glue.</em></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Both absence and presence,<br />&#13; you are the hole inside the empty bucket,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>biblical void, wholly ghost,<br />&#13; suffused with unknown potential,</p>&#13; &#13; <p>proof something comes from nothing.<br />&#13; Without you everything would be lost.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>You are the white paper for my uncertain pen.<br />&#13; You are the air I step through above this broken sidewalk.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published <em>Sierra Nevada Review </em>(2015). Also appears in <em>Immensity </em>(Kelsay Books, 2016).</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Shooting Stars at Ghost Ranch</h3>&#13; &#13; <p style="margin-left:.5in;"><em>What is it we are a part of we do not see</em>?<br />&#13; —Loren Eiseley​</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Such brightness in the immense<br />&#13; blackness I try to comprehend.<br />&#13; A universe 13 billion years old,<br />&#13; space-time, curved with strings<br />&#13; that sound in ten dimensions,<br />&#13; transparent matter holding together<br />&#13; billions of stars and planets.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This August night<br />&#13; I only know Earth I call <em>home </em><br />&#13; is orbiting through a far-off field,<br />&#13; bits and pieces of comet rock<br />&#13; slamming into our atmosphere<br />&#13; lighting up nighttime.<br />&#13; Brilliant Perseid meteors<br />&#13; more than fifty we count<br />&#13; an hour, their persistent trains<br />&#13; lacing across the constellations<br />&#13; in a New Mexican sky on top of<br />&#13; a sleeping mesa where we sit<br />&#13; in a small galaxy of armchairs<br />&#13; and I murmur to you <em>Ohhh </em><br />&#13; as each passes over our heads,<br />&#13; falling, burning itself up and out.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Immensity </em>(Kelsay Books, 2016)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Solo Hiking, Utah</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Silent spires fill sight<br />&#13; light rises on red bluffs</p>&#13; &#13; <p>buttes and blue sky<br />&#13; climb to cairns cross</p>&#13; &#13; <p>slick rock fins wind-faced<br />&#13; grasp bend and tread</p>&#13; &#13; <p>grip and scale boulders<br />&#13; scrape body to rock face</p>&#13; &#13; <p>then stem and press chest<br />&#13; against walls or walk</p>&#13; &#13; <p>on knees, reel and breathe<br />&#13; deep air.  In a layered</p>&#13; &#13; <p>and pocked slot of knotted<br />&#13; tree roots lift hips from the slit</p>&#13; &#13; <p>when boots slip then<br />&#13; slide down lichened stone</p>&#13; &#13; <p>sides of time-molded folds<br />&#13; and crab-crawl across ledge</p>&#13; &#13; <p>edges sensing each measure<br />&#13; of descent to sand dune</p>&#13; &#13; <p>noon oasis of old juniper<br />&#13; shade to a curved cave</p>&#13; &#13; <p>where wind whispers time<br />&#13; and an arch opens like an eye.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Immensity </em>(Kelsay Books, 2016)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Land That Moves Back and Forth</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Between umber sand, blue-streaked sky,<br />&#13; existence is a thin layer, place<br />&#13; Ute people named <em>Sowapopheuyehe,<br />&#13; land that moves back and forth,</em><br />&#13; where you finger-sift a handful into mine,<br />&#13; grains so fine that once were mountains.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ten miles out we watched cloud shadows<br />&#13; sweep across dun-colored hills<br />&#13; transformed to massive dunes<br />&#13; back-dropped by Sangre de Christos​<br />&#13; over 14,000 feet, snow-capped in October.<br />&#13; Closer still the mounds lengthened,<br />&#13; unmetamorphic expanse stretched north<br />&#13; to south, a changing, ancient horizon.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Out of the car our feet touch down on<br />&#13; whatever sand last night blew in.<br />&#13; We inhale pungent yellow rabbit brush,<br />&#13; frame photos in gray-green rice grass.<br />&#13; Below us Medano Creek’s silver curve<br />&#13; glints in sunlight, its shallows cold<br />&#13; we wade through, bare-toed in Tevas.</p>&#13; &#13; <p><em>Water, sand, wind-</em>-we only need three words.<br />&#13; You reach out your hand to pull me<br />&#13; when we slow-climb the closest one,<br />&#13; higher, deeper as air swirls, sands sting,<br />&#13; form waves we ride to the summit,<br />&#13; squint at behind sunglasses<br />&#13; before gravity pulls us like moonwalkers.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>All day time’s construct expands.<br />&#13; I hold breath to meet it,<br />&#13; watch afternoon light spill, shadows shift<br />&#13; over dune faces, sands shape to fold, hollow, slope.<br /><em>Perdonanos nuestros pecados tambien.<br />&#13; Forgive us also our trespasses.</em></p>&#13; &#13; <p>By night we’ve grown spare, our need only<br />&#13; to shelter in fragrant sage under <em>alimosas.</em><br />&#13; Hours slow.  Awareness swells.<br />&#13; Ripple to bar, drift to ridge,<br />&#13; sand has already erased our footprints</p>&#13; &#13; <p>.</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Carousel</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>With his small hands the eager child<br />&#13; grins and grips the fat brass pole<br />&#13; astride a sleek cream-colored pony<br />&#13; with painted wreath and legs a-gallop.</p>&#13; &#13; <p> </p>&#13; &#13; <p>He reaches out for its carved mane<br />&#13; as around in a parade he rides<br />&#13; and leans his head back to look<br />&#13; up high in a red canopy<br />&#13; where a hundred or more white lights shine<br />&#13; on mirrors and pictures in golden frames<br />&#13; where an organ hid somewhere inside<br />&#13; plays circus music.  His eyes roam</p>&#13; &#13; <p>as he holds still and the world revolves--<br />&#13; sky and park and trees and people--<br />&#13; while his parents, moving slowly past him,<br />&#13; smile and wave one more time<br />&#13; and then he remembers their faces.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Innisfree </em>(2011). Also appears in <em>Canyon Notes </em>(Ridgway, CO: Mt. Sneffels Press, 2012).</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Red Fox</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>A blaze of gold<br />&#13;             more than red<br />&#13; in early evening light,<br />&#13;             you strode slow through snow-<br />&#13; dusted new grass, skirting<br />&#13;             a low hill behind the house.<br />&#13; Then black ears pointed up, you sensed<br />&#13;             my presence on the porch<br />&#13; and turned your sleek head, sharp nose,<br />&#13;             toward me quick-<br />&#13; flashing black bead eyes.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>How you lit up<br />&#13;             the dull afternoon<br />&#13; with your confidence<br />&#13;             and bravado</p>&#13; &#13; <p>and in that moment gave me<br />&#13;             a grim hint of your intent<br />&#13; before you trod soundless<br />&#13;             to the forest edge<br />&#13; where lesser creatures live.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Bright hunter—<br />&#13;             what more do I have<br />&#13; to fear or desire?</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>Terrain </em>(2008). Also appears in <em>Wild Raspberries </em>(Austin, TX: Plain View Press, 2009).</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Except for Crows</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>I consider you common crow,<br />&#13; beautiful  black rag in the sky.<br />&#13; Some call you trash bird<br />&#13; but I see you sleek,<br />&#13; slick in a silk suit,<br />&#13; in the best seat of the cottonwood.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>True, you are often the undertaker<br />&#13; bobbing along side the road,<br />&#13; your voice perhaps too eager<br />&#13; broadcasting in clamorous caws news<br />&#13; of what to eat that’s dead.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>I, whose heavy feet find only earth,<br />&#13; envy your perspective of gravity<br />&#13; and that among other birds<br />&#13; of less proven intelligence.<br />&#13; you don’t even display smugness.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Some campers have tried<br />&#13; tricking you with ropes into thinking<br />&#13; you were trapped inside a circle,<br />&#13; but you showed them<br />&#13; (first with one foot, then the other)<br />&#13; you know how to test boundaries.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>I especially admire your monogamy,<br />&#13; the way two of you travel<br />&#13; through life’s blue air<br />&#13; seventy years or more, sometimes<br />&#13; resting on stretched wires or in trees<br />&#13; whose branches move slightly<br />&#13; with your dark weight.<br />&#13; And high inside rock clefts<br />&#13; you raise your young<br />&#13; to ignore all the trash talk<br />&#13; and to believe in the beauty<br />&#13; of their own blackness.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>First published in <em>The Kerf</em> (2003). Also appears in <em>The Company of Trees </em>(Ponderosa Press, 2004).</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/art" hreflang="en">Art</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a 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http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/veronica-patterson <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Veronica Patterson</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 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addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/veronica-patterson" data-a2a-title="Veronica Patterson"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fveronica-patterson&amp;title=Veronica%20Patterson"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Veronica Patterson" src="/sites/default/files/Veronica_Patterson.jpg" style="width: 500px; height: 500px;" /></p> <p>Veronica Patterson’s most recent full-length poetry collection is <em>Sudden White Fan</em> (Cherry Grove Collections, 2018). Others include <em>How to Make a Terrarium</em> (Cleveland State University, 1987), <em>Swan, What Shores?</em> (NYU Press Poetry Prize, 2000), <em>Thresh &amp; Hold </em>(Gell Poetry Prize, 2009), <em>&amp; it had rained</em> (CW Books, 2013), and two chapbooks—<em>This Is the Strange Part</em> (Pudding House, 2002) and <em>Maneuvers: Battle of the Little Bighorn Poems</em> (Finishing Line, 2013). She lives in Loveland, Colorado, where she writes, edits, and teaches creative writing for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.</p> <h2>Poems</h2> <h3>Margaret</h3> <p><em>—for my mother</em></p> <p>Margaret is a field.<br /> In the field goldenrod thickens. Weeds grow so tall<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; that by August you can’t see.<br /> Margaret is a path through the field and she is where<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the path disappears.<br /> Margaret is the house with the red door and the room<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; with the maroon floor, where four children sleep a troubled sleep.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; When they wake she sends them outside and they raise a calf,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; a collie, each other.<br /> Margaret smokes so she can see each sigh. She smokes constantly.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The ashtrays overflow. Later, as therapy, she will make ashtrays.<br /> Margaret is a dream Margaret once had. Margaret drinks toward the dream<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; she can’t quite forget and doesn’t dare remember. She wakes<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; to choose sleep.<br /> She is a wrong turn Margaret took or several turns. She is bad about<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; directions.<br /> Margaret is not a door that opens nor cruelty nor a bed nor forgiveness.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But she can be forgiven.<br /> I repeat, Margaret is a field and a path through the field and the point<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; where the path disappears. She will not come to find you.<br /> Because she will not come to find you, you start out deep<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; in this gold and weedy field.</p> <p>First published in <em>Colorado North Review</em>. Also appears in <em>Swan, What Shores?</em></p> <h3>Three Photographs Not of My Father</h3> <p>I am writing about this photograph of a rock<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; because I am not writing about my father.<br /> The rock is not here. Neither is my father.<br /> The rock is alone. And my father?<br /> The photographer found the rock absorbing. It has<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; no <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/rock-art-colorado">petroglyphs</a></strong>. What do I know of my father’s life?<br /> The sky is pure blue. My father was a chemist<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; who distilled liquid to vapor then liquid again,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; the way dreams precipitate into worlds.<br /> The rock lies in a desert. What was his dream?</p> <p>I am writing about a photograph of a girl on a motorcycle<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; because I am still not writing about my father.<br /> She is grinning. In all the photographs, my father is grinning.<br /> She holds a cigarette. My father held a cigarette. Though my mother<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; held a cigarette, she was far too beautiful for their fortune<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; to be told.<br /> The girl straddles the motorcycle. My father raced cars.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; Around and around he orbited the waiting<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; family and never left, and left.&nbsp;</p> <p>I am writing about a photograph of a Buddhist man walking<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; away because I am writing about my father.<br /> His face is turned away. My father’s face has turned away.<br /> The folds of his saffron robe surround him. My father wore a<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; white lab coat.<br /> The monk crosses a wooden bridge, walks to a house roofed in<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; grass.<br /> My father told stories that grew longer in the middle. He died<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; mid-sentence. Was he surprised to be so soon<br /> &nbsp; like the boy in the story he recited who stood on the burning deck?<br /> O captain, my captain, who will recite you? I, who was distilled<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; in my father’s house, I?</p> <p>First published in <em>Salt Hill Journal</em>. Also appears in <em>Swan, What Shores?</em></p> <h3>Threshold</h3> <p>The night you lay dying,<br /> there was a space around the house<br /> into which nothing <em>untoward</em> could come,<br /> in which nothing but your dying could take place.<br /> It was a hole in the field,<br /> like the hush into which a child is born. As if<br /> at all times, or whenever necessary,<br /> shafts of quiet pierce the world – we don’t know<br /> the ways of the soul.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But we know how artists make a map<br /> of somewhere foreign, then telescope one spot forward,<br /> to show details. You lay on the bed,<br /> breathing hard. A lens of lamplight. Your husband<br /> on one side of you, I on the other. We told small, round stories,<br /> beads on a string we passed over you. As if<br /> that were our job, while yours was counting<br /> out your breaths to the last.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; When I left, I took the waiting<br /> with me. But it wasn’t waiting; there was no time in it.<br /> I woke before dawn, with these words,<br /> “Why do you seek the dead among the living?” The call came,<br /> like news of someone arrived safely in another country.<br /> I am always surprised that the word <em>threshold</em><br /> hinges on just one <em>h</em>. Each time, I write one for <em>thresh</em><br /> and one for <em>hold</em>.</p> <p>First published in <em>New Letters.</em> Also appears in <em>Thresh &amp; Hold </em>(Big Pencil Press, 2009).</p> <h3>How I Created the Universe</h3> <p><em>—for Evan</em></p> <p>First, I said, let there be light. I considered other things<br /> but light seemed a place to start. I could see where I was,<br /> where to go. I like to watch light on snow,<br /> so I made snow. Good light. Good snow.</p> <p>On the second day, I created your arms to divide me<br /> from chaos, which I also need.</p> <p>On the third day, I formed your body to fit mine; we spun<br /> like an axis, so I thought of and made the earth.</p> <p>On the fourth day, I created the children at their present ages,<br /> our house, the twelve pine trees in the yard, our street,<br /> our jobs, garbage, and a truck to collect it Thursdays.</p> <p>On the fifth day, I made history, so we would know<br /> what we'd done, and women's rights, so we wouldn't do it again.<br /> I made countries and people and newspapers to report them.<br /> I said, let there be Stephen Hawking, physicist in a wheelchair,<br /> to tie it all together and figure out how it might have happened<br /> if I hadn't made it myself.</p> <p>The sixth day dawned: I invented God to answer questions<br /> of suffering, which I did not invent, but which is,<br /> and love (which I made space for on day two), then<br /> restlessness and a true teacher.</p> <p>On the seventh day, I chanted more of the list: horizons,<br /> libraries, elephants, the Art Institute of Chicago, the<br /> French horn. I left some items to others. Last, poetry—<br /> the Williams, Shakespeare and Blake, and Emily Dickinson—<br /> and the second law of thermodynamics, all to strip disguises<br /> from order and chaos, and from then on there was no time,<br /> no place to rest until</p> <p>I remembered your arms the second day.</p> <p>First published in <em>Mid-American Review</em>. Also appears in <em>Swan, What Shores? </em>(New York: New York University Press, 2000).</p> <h3>A Short History of Arithmetic and Science</h3> <p>In first grade, <em>we</em> were the base, and a simple match of fingers and oranges led to the right answers. Or we added a picture of an orange to a picture of an orange, and then went on to lunch, storytime, a nap.</p> <p>When we got older, we had to leave our hands to consider weight, other fruits, prices: six oranges at twenty-five cents each or apples at so much a pound¾McIntosh, which were delicious and Delicious, which were not.</p> <p>Then life picked up speed and suddenly the train was leaving at 5:00 p.m. from a station 100 miles away and we had to get there in a car traveling 55 miles per hour or miss the one who was coming, first, by canoe (4 miles per hour) and bus (whose speed was unpredictable, which we would later call the uncertainty principle) to meet us in a city we had never been to.</p> <p>And if we got the answer right and rode the train all night and met the bus, would we pass, or be loved forever, though we couldn’t define love, for this was not English or philosophy or psychology, but math. What if we were off by a nanosecond, a billionth of a second, a near miss we could say but never think of?</p> <p>Meanwhile, someone had slipped in infinity, that figure skater’s requirement, and donuts with surfaces that never ended. We had to deal with powers, those smug little numbers above the others. And the stars, as it turned out, were light years away. And because light traveled at 186,300 miles per second, we loved beneath old, old light but felt new. And began to fear subtraction.</p> <p>Then it was calculus, and Einstein with his big E, and time started bending and space became a continuum we weren’t sure we were on. Quarks were the only Truth and black holes sucked in anyone who went too close and many followed like Jews to the station. The tinkertoy atom exploded and we, who once thought civilization was all geometric progression, stood with our mouths open zeros.</p> <p>Chaos kept turning into order, though it looked like chaos from here. We could not find randomness when we were looking for it. But we discovered that our cells replaced themselves at astonishing rates; we were new over and over but felt old.</p> <p>I have no answers¾differential, integral, or infinitesimal¾but this page is still my worksheet, and I fill in the blank that once I filled with long, long division with this equation: stay with me beneath the stars. I’m good at remainders.</p> <p>We’ll go out and recline like Cassiopeia and pretend that the dipper¾that looks tonight like it could scoop up the house¾<em>is</em> what will dip us up at last and pour us into another place with a different mathematics. We’ll peel and eat two oranges—one for me, one for you—lick our fingers and opposing thumbs before we walk together out onto the grass, among the 10,000 green blades.</p> <p>First published in <em>Swan, What Shores? </em>(New York: New York University Press, 2000).</p> <h3>Perseids, Later</h3> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; —for Evan</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A tease of clouds intermits<br /> the searing blueblack. Cicadas<br /> drone in a 3 a.m. silence<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; and I fall back</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; onto an Army blanket, 1956,<br /> a meadow outside Ithaca, lying with sister<br /> and brother, in the grip of fierce&nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; dreams and longings, my skin</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; alive with <em>up,</em><br /> drawn to the studded dark, whose<br /> tiny burns might be those of a sparkler<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; twirled too fast.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This night, as you sleep inside,<br /> I lift binoculars to contain<br /> these pricking lights, which<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; perforate,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;yet still pull me<br /> to them. Your dream wafts from the house,<br /> a stay. In waning heat, in my thin<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; nightshirt, I feel</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the years accordion,<br /> and I shiver. Each of us<br /> gets to be vast sometime. Three&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; meteors streak</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the length<br /> of a star-glazed strand<br /> of my hair. <em>How can the birds sleep<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; in this confetti of light?</em></p> <p>First published in <em>Driftwood Review. </em>Also appears in <em>Sudden White Fan.</em></p> <h3>News of the World, 1887</h3> <p>—after Vincent Van Gogh’s <em>Grapes, Lemons, Pears, and Apples</em></p> <p>Nothing holds still. Lemons import a sharp light. The purple grapes have left behind<br /> the vineyards of history, which makes them luminous and sweet. The green grapes are<br /> like painters; even their jealousies have a certain flair. Yellow leaves gesture to autumn. Someone brought them in—rather than sorrow or ashes—from a walk. Here, they itch for wind and field again. One of five apples hurries off the canvas. Such <em>leaving</em>. But then, just for a moment, each fruit ponders its personal how-I-came-to-be-in-the-studio-this-morning. Hosting paint. None can imagine its long role as <em>the past</em>. Or see stems as wicks. The cosmos swirls here as a tablecloth, serving up everything. Note the rare pigment<em> burnt joy</em>.&nbsp;</p> <h3>Ludlow</h3> <p style="margin-left:.5in;"><em>In 1914, miners and their families were shot and killed<br /> by armed guards called in to break up the miners' camp.<br /> The incident came to be known as the <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/ludlow-massacre">Ludlow Massacre</a></strong>.</em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>There is hardly a sign of it now<br /> in the meadow that moves into two valleys<br /> just off the highway in southern Colorado.<br /> The grass sways in the breeze. It is<br /> a beautiful erasure.</p> <p>Down a road in a small fenced yard a monument lifts<br /> like a hand. There is a covered pit where striking miners,<br /> their wives and children died, pits like graves,<br /> then graves. It was 1914, early spring.</p> <p>Outside the fence is a box<br /> with a visitor’s notebook: “My father<br /> mined coal for thirty years. He died last fall<br /> of lung disease . . .” “This was a terrible time.<br /> It isn’t over . . .” The breeze<br /> riffles the pages.</p> <p>So this is history, I think: a father’s darkening lung,<br /> this meadow grown sweet and blank.<br /> Then the tenses stun me: this happened,<br /> this is happening, this will happen.<br /> I look again at the universe of grass and forgetting.</p> <p>I sign the book.</p> <p>Published in <em>Thresh &amp; Hold </em>(Big Pencil Press, 2009).</p> <h3>Signatures</h3> <p style="margin-left:.5in;"><em>“Artifacts are signatures of particular kinds of behavior.”</em><br /> —Richard A. Gould, in<em> Archeological Perspectives on the<br /> Battle of the Little Bighorn</em></p> <p>cartridge case arrowhead rib bullet obliquely severed cervical vertebra Spencer case evidence of extraction failure articulated arm bones of a young soldier eight trouser buttons four river cobbles fingerbone (encircled with a ring) Dimmick case right foot lower arm leg and foot (still encased in a cavalry boot) facial bones of a male (pipe smoker) butt-plate screw fob ring carbine swing swivel snap backstrap ejector rod button from an 1873 Colt revolver two cartridges struck by bullets distal ulna lead fragments Barlow-style pocket knife fire-steel loading lever forage-cap chin-strap tin cup canteen stopper-ring saddle guard plate trouser-buckle telescope eyepiece Remington bullet white porcelain shirt button harness rivet girth D-ring tip of gold-painted butcher knife flatnosed bullet with single crimping groove (bone embedded) Indian ornament made from cartridge cases suspender-grip tobacco-tag hook-and-eye watch movement regulator hand 1872 cavalry boot (upper cut away) general-service button (blue wool attached) femur mess-fork hoof pick cranial vault fragment (sky showing through)</p> <p>First published in <em>Coal City Review.</em> Also appears in <em>Maneuvers: Poems of the Battle of the Little Bighorn </em>(Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 2013).</p> <h3>My Edward Hopper Eye, My Claude Monet</h3> <p>I walk the streets at night<br /> shutting first one eye, then the other.</p> <p>The left eye is Hopper, its lens<br /> too clear for comfort, the hard lines<br /> of a town you're stuck in, always<br /> August, noon or midnight.</p> <p>The right eye haloes each street lamp.<br /> Threads of light dissolve each tree into<br /> the next in Paris, spring,<br /> dusk.</p> <p>Who could live in that Hopper city?<br /> Once I married there and became<br /> that beautician with hennaed hair<br /> and too many secrets, none her own.</p> <p>In Monet's garden of well-tended horizons<br /> I sleep three nights, then someone delivers<br /> a newspaper. In the damp green air<br /> events rub off on my hands.</p> <p>In every storm<br /> one eye watches bare light<br /> shock the land, split a tree;<br /> the other sees each gutter<br /> alive with wings and the rain rinsing.</p> <p>And so the eyes argue:<br /> one strips, one clothes. One cauterizes,<br /> one salves. And I<br /> walk on.</p> <p>First published in <em>Louisville Review</em>. Also appears in <em>Swan, What Shores? </em>(New York: New York University Press, 2000). The poem was also read by Garrison Keillor on his radio program, “Writer’s Almanac.”</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/art" hreflang="en">Art</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a 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yongli 3026 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Wayne Miller http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/wayne-miller <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Wayne Miller</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN 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'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2019-01-23T16:46:31-07:00" title="Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - 16:46" class="datetime">Wed, 01/23/2019 - 16:46</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/wayne-miller" data-a2a-title="Wayne Miller"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fwayne-miller&amp;title=Wayne%20Miller"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Wayne Miller" src="/sites/default/files/Wayne_Miller.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 492px;" /></p> <p>Wayne Miller is the author of four poetry collections, including <em>Post-</em> (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016), which won the Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award. He lives in Denver with his wife and two children and teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where he edits the literary journal <em>Copper Nickel</em>.</p> <h2>Poems</h2> <h3>The Debt</h3> <p>He entered through the doorway of his debt.<br /> Workmen followed, bringing box after box</p> <p>until everything he’d gathered in his life<br /> inhabited his debt. He opened the sliding door to the yard—</p> <p>a breeze blew through the spaces of his debt,<br /> blew the bills from the table onto the floor.</p> <p>The grove of birches and, farther,<br /> the beach of driftwood and broken shells</p> <p>were framed by the enormous window—<br /> that lens-like architectural focus of his debt.</p> <p>He drove into town on the coiled springs<br /> of his debt; when he bought fish at the market</p> <p>he proffered his Mastercard. The dark woods<br /> stretching inland were pocked by lightfilled cubes</p> <p>of debt. The very words he used to describe<br /> his surroundings were glittering facets</p> <p>of debt. Each visit, we smoked on the deck<br /> and, over drinks, he reminded me</p> <p>with love and genuine pride: one day<br /> all this debt would be mine.</p> <p>“The Debt” from <em>Post-</em>. Copyright © 2016 . Used with permission from Milkweed Editions.</p> <h3>Post-Elegy</h3> <p>After the plane went down<br /> the cars sat for weeks in long-term parking.<br /> Then, one by one, they began to disappear<br /> from among the cars of the living.</p> <p>———</p> <p>When we went to retrieve his<br /> you drove the rows of the lot<br /> while I pushed the panic button on the fob.</p> <p>———</p> <p>Inside, a takeout coffee cup<br /> sat in its cradle,<br /> a skim of decay<br /> floating beneath the lid.<br /> I’d ridden in his car<br /> many times but never driven it.</p> <p>———</p> <p>When I turned the key<br /> the radio<br /> opened unexpectedly,<br /> like an eye.</p> <p>———</p> <p>I was conscious of the ground<br /> passing just beneath the floor—<br /> and the trapped air in the tires<br /> lifting my weight. I realized</p> <p>I was steering homeward<br /> the down payment<br /> of some house we might live in<br /> for the rest of our lives.</p> <p>Originally published in <em>Post-</em> (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h3>Inside the Book</h3> <p>For my daughter: these images,<br /> these trenches of script. She keeps<br /> reaching to pull them<br /> from the page, as if the book<br /> were an opened cabinet;</p> <p>every time, the page<br /> blocks her hand. They’re <em>right<br /> there</em>—those pictures<br /> vivid as stained glass,<br /> those tiny, inscrutable knots.</p> <p>They hang in that space<br /> where a world was built<br /> in fits and erasures—she wants<br /> to lift that world<br /> into her own.</p> <p>Meanwhile, <em>this</em> world<br /> floods her thoughts,<br /> her voice; it fills<br /> the windows, the streets<br /> she moves through;</p> <p>it reaches into her<br /> as the air reaches into her lungs.<br /> Then, before we know it,<br /> here she is with us<br /> inside the book.</p> <p>Originally published in <em>Post-</em> (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).</p> <h3>The People’s History</h3> <p>The People moved up the street in a long column—<br /> like a machine boring a tunnel. They sang<br /> the People’s songs, they chanted the People’s slogans:<br /> We are the People, not the engines of the city;<br /> we, the People, will not be denied.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Then the People<br /> descended upon the People, swinging hardwood batons<br /> heavy with the weight of the People’s intent.</p> <p>And the People surged, then, into the rows before them,<br /> pushing the People against the blurred arcs<br /> of truncheons, the People throwing rocks<br /> into the plastic shields and visors,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;behind which<br /> the People blinked when the rocks hit, then pushed back<br /> so the mass of People before them compressed.</p> <p>In the windows above the street, the People looked down<br /> and thought, Thank god we’re not the People<br /> trapped, now, in the confines of those bodies.</p> <p>And soon the People on rooftops loaded their rifles<br /> with wax bullets—which looked like earplugs —</p> <p>which the People had produced in factories<br /> full of People flanking machines designed by the People.</p> <p>When the bullets buried themselves in the People<br /> the People cried, Those shooters are not the People,<br /> some piece of them has been removed—<br /> like a fuse—the true People are a surface<br /> that floats on the sea of our fathers—<br /> how they buoy us! the People shouted.</p> <p>But the People had grown tired of the afternoon<br /> and released dogs into the crowd, dogs<br /> that could not tell the People from the People;<br /> and the People fled in all directions, back into the city,<br /> singing with pain.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;—And now, children,<br /> when we meet the People in the market<br /> how will we know them? <em>Their clubs and their bruises,<br /> their language of power. </em><br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What about concepts?<br /> <em>They fill them with bodies</em>.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And weapons?<br /> <em>They spend hours piecing them together.</em></p> <p>What else? <em>They open their mouths.</em></p> <p>And what else? <em>Nothing—they open their mouths</em>.<br /> Is that wrong?<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <em>—Excuse me,<br /> but what gives us the right to define them?</em></p> <p>That’s not what I’m saying.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <em>Excuse me,<br /> but aren’t we, too, the People?</em> Yes, but wiser.</p> <p><em>But sir, how can the surface be different from the sea?</em></p> <p>Originally published in <em>Post-</em> (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).</p> <h3>Ballad (American, 21<sup>st</sup> Century)</h3> <p>That spring, the shooter was everywhere—<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; shot from our minds into the hedgerows,<br /> the pickup beds and second-floor windows,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the hillocks and tentacled live oaks. And sometimes</p> <p>he was tracking us with the dilated<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; pupil at the tip of his rifle. His bullets spun<br /> into the theater’s stop-sign faces, the tessellated<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; car lots beyond the exits; they tore holes</p> <p>in our restaurants and vinyl siding, those fiberglass<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; teacups we clamored into at the county fair.<br /> Though you don’t remember it, Little Bear,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; a bullet crossed right in front of your car seat—</p> <p>then window glass covered you like bits<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; of clouded ice, and the rain came pouring in<br /> as I raced for shelter at the Wendy’s off Exit 10.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Every night we kept our curtains drawn,</p> <p>and while your mother slept I sat alone<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; in the bathroom dark watching the news surface<br /> into the ice-cut window of my cell phone.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; They said the shooter was in Saint Louis</p> <p>shooting up a middle school gym, then<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; he’d gone to the beach, where he killed a girl<br /> pouring sand from a cup into a sandwich tin.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (Nevertheless, I pictured his face as a cloud</p> <p>of insects hovering in the blackest corner<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; of the empty lot across the street.) At work<br /> they walked us through scenarios—what to throw<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; if he came through my classroom door,</p> <p>how to arm the students (desks!)<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; for counterattack. And when he came—<br /> and when those next four children were erased—<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; they trapped him in a high-speed chase</p> <p>toward the touchless carwash, where the cops<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; encircled him and, rather than relent,<br /> he put his rifle barrel to his mouth like the mouth<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; of a test tube from some childhood experiment.</p> <p>Originally published in <em>Post-</em> (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).</p> <h3>Image: Psychotherapy</h3> <p>The ship is so close to shore<br /> it seems ridiculous it can’t be righted.<br /> Every day it slips a little more.</p> <p>The rooftop pool has poured its water<br /> into the sea. The stacks’ mouths<br /> dip below the tide—water</p> <p>inside an engine already underwater.<br /> It feels like I should be able<br /> to reach out and shift the rudder</p> <p>on its massive hinge, lift the ship<br /> back into its buoyancy. Even here—<br /> on this shelf past the lip</p> <p>of town—it’s impossible<br /> to have any real sense of its scale.</p> <p>Originally published in <em>Post-</em> (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).</p> <h3>The Humanist</h3> <p>When he rose before the jury of his peers<br /> he knew he had arrived at the endgame<br /> of his belief, mirror against mirror,</p> <p>and when they read to him his crimes—<br /> his betrayal of the time’s<br /> consensus—he saw he would be folded into the body</p> <p>of the human story. He would be<br /> judged and found guilty<br /> of elevating men to this very position of judgment.</p> <p>The loneliest person on earth<br /> is a humanist condemned. When the pyre<br /> was lit, it bloated the square</p> <p>with light—the light his body fed.<br /> (Later the guards cleaned up in darkness.<br /> We have no record of what they said.)</p> <p>“The Humanist” appeared on the website <em>32 Poems</em>.</p> <h3>After the Miscarriage</h3> <p>We went out to sit in the car<br /> —snow coming down—<br /> just to get out of the house.</p> <p>I lowered the window sometimes<br /> to stop the snow<br /> from sealing us in.</p> <p>———</p> <p>The lights were still on<br /> in those rooms where our daughter,<br /> barely three, kept moving,<br /> shifting her things.</p> <p>———</p> <p>How many days—<br /> weeks—did we leave her<br /> in that lit-up silence?</p> <p>———</p> <p>Back inside,<br /> we let our footprints<br /> melt on the floor.</p> <p>She ran and hugged us<br /> each entirely, as though</p> <p>we’d come home after curfew<br /> to this devoted,<br /> oblivious parent.</p> <p>“After the Miscarriage” appeared in <em>Field</em>. Copyright © 2017 .</p> <h3>Ohio, My Friends Are Dying</h3> <p>I see their final days<br /> in empty rooms</p> <p>in that city<br /> I left. See</p> <p>their days as empty rooms<br /> I left—empty</p> <p><em>because </em>I left.<br /> Though, surely</p> <p>their lives were filled<br /> with things</p> <p>I can’t see, filled,<br /> as mine was elsewhere,</p> <p>with time<br /> that gathered to become</p> <p>whatever their lives<br /> meant to them.</p> <p>Of course<br /> more filled them</p> <p>than heroin.<br /> Days gathered</p> <p>into a heavy lens<br /> through which</p> <p>I see my friends,<br /> blurred, in those</p> <p>abstract rooms<br /> that suddenly emptied.</p> <p>“Ohio, My Friends Are Dying” appeared in <em>Waxwing</em> magazine.</p> <h3>Carillon</h3> <p>Phones were ringing</p> <p>in the pockets of the living<br /> and the dead</p> <p>the living stepped carefully among.<br /> The whole still room</p> <p>was lit with sound—like a switchboard—<br /> and those who could answer</p> <p>said hello. Then<br /> it was just the dead, the living</p> <p>trapped inside their clothes<br /> ringing and ringing them—</p> <p>and this was<br /> the best image we had</p> <p>of what made us a nation.</p> <p>“Carillon” appeared in <em>Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day</em>. Copyright © 2017 .</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/language-arts" hreflang="en">Language Arts</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/literature" hreflang="en">Literature</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/writing" hreflang="en">Writing</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/us-history" hreflang="en">U.S. History</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/psychology" hreflang="en">Psychology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/civicspolitics" hreflang="en">Civics/Politics</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/world-history" hreflang="en">World History</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sonnet" hreflang="en">Sonnet</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> Wed, 23 Jan 2019 23:46:31 +0000 yongli 3025 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org David Mason http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/david-mason <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">David Mason</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2019-01-23T14:54:22-07:00" title="Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - 14:54" class="datetime">Wed, 01/23/2019 - 14:54</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/david-mason" data-a2a-title="David Mason"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fdavid-mason&amp;title=David%20Mason"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: David Mason" src="/sites/default/files/David_Mason.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 450px;" /></p> <p>David Mason’s books of poems include <em>The Buried Houses </em>(winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), <em>The Country I Remember</em> (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and <em>Arrivals. </em>His verse novel, <em>Ludlow</em>, was published in 2007 and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. It was also featured on the <em>PBS News Hour.</em> Author of a collection of essays, <em>The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry</em>, his memoir, <em>News from the Village,</em> appeared in 2010. A new collection of essays, <em>Two Minds of a Western Poet,</em> followed in 2011. Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including <em>Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, </em>and <em>Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry.</em> He has also written the libretti for composer Lori Laitman’s opera of <em>The Scarlet Letter </em>(which had its professional premiere at Opera Colorado in May 2013) and her oratorio, <em>Vedem. </em>He recently won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize for the development of a new libretto. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he served as Poet Laureate of Colorado (2010–14) and teaches at Colorado College.</p> <h2>Poems</h2> <h3>Fathers and Sons</h3> <p>Some things, they say,<br /> one should not write about. I tried<br /> to help my father comprehend the toilet, how one needs<br /> to undo one’s belt, to slide<br /> one’s trousers down and sit,<br /> but he stubbornly stood<br /> and would not bend his knees.<br /> I tried again to bend him toward the seat,</p> <p>and then I laughed<br /> at the absurdity. Fathers and sons.<br /> How he had wiped my bottom<br /> half a century ago, and how<br /> I would repay the favor<br /> if only he would sit.</p> <p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Don’t you—<br /> he gripped me, trembling, searching for my eyes.<br /> Don’t you—but the word<br /> was lost to him. Somewhere<br /> a man of dignity would not be laughed at.<br /> He could not see<br /> it was only the crazy dance<br /> that made me laugh,<br /> trying to make him sit<br /> when he wanted to stand.</p> <p>First published in <em>The New Yorker</em><br /> Also appears in <em>The Sound: New and Selected Poems</em> (Red Hen Press 2018)</p> <h3>The Soul Fox</h3> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <em>for Chrissy, 28 October 2011</em></p> <p>My love, the fox is in the yard.<br /> The snow will bear his print a while,<br /> then melt and go, but we who saw<br /> his way of finding out, his night<br /> of seeking, know what we have seen<br /> and are the better for it. Write.<br /> Let the white page bear the mark,<br /> then melt with joy upon the dark.</p> <p>First published in <em>The Virginia Quarterly Review</em><br /> Also appears in <em>The Sound: New and Selected Poems</em> (Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2018)</p> <h3>To the Sea of Cortez</h3> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <em>For Robert King</em></p> <p>And if I could I would<br /> fall down, fall all the way<br /> down to the breathing sea.<br /> I would pass by the towns<br /> I would pass by the grass<br /> banks where the buffalo graze.<br /> I would fall down, I would<br /> lie down in the red mud<br /> of memory, where Spanish<br /> lances lie with arrowheads.<br /> I would lie down and roll<br /> my being to the sea,<br /> unroll and roll, lap and sing<br /> my body down, and down<br /> and turn at the hard cliffs<br /> and carry the soft soil<br /> with me. Nothing would impede<br /> my downward being, my<br /> desire to lie down like a fawn<br /> in the new grass, like trout<br /> in the shallows, like a child<br /> tired of making letters<br /> out of chalk, or talk<br /> of airy nothings caught<br /> by fingers made of lead.<br /> I would lie down and go,<br /> and go until I found<br /> the sea that rose to meet<br /> whatever thread of me<br /> had made it there, out there<br /> among vaquitas and swift birds,<br /> there where hardy grasses<br /> have not been annihilated,<br /> where the salt tides rise,<br /> looking for currents they<br /> have loved, and finding me.</p> <p>From <em>The Sound: New and Selected Poems </em>(Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2018)</p> <h3>The Tarmac</h3> <p><em>Lack</em>, you say?&nbsp; The world will strip you naked.<br /> Time you realized it. Too many years<br /> you worked in a plush denial, head down,<br /> dodging yourself as much as others.</p> <p>Nobody did this to you.<br /> Trained in deafness, you soon went blind,<br /> but gathered strength for metamorphosis<br /> in order to become your kind.</p> <p>Now nothing helps but silence as you learn<br /> slowly the letting go,<br /> and learn again, and over again, again,<br /> blow upon blow,</p> <p>you must go by the way of mountain tides,<br /> coral blizzards and the sunlit rain.<br /> The wave of nausea heaves<br /> and passes through the egocentric pain</p> <p>and finds you on a tarmac going where<br /> your skin and hair, eyes, ears and fingers feel<br /> a change is in the air.<br /> You are unfolding now, and almost real.</p> <p>First published in <em>Radio Silence</em><br /> Also appears in <em>The Sound: New and Selected Poems</em> (Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2018)</p> <h3>Stonewall Gap</h3> <p>Windblown aridity in early spring,<br /> <strong>piñon</strong>, prickly pear, the struggling scrub.<br /> At noon my shadow pooled beneath my boots,<br /> my eyes surveying ground a step ahead<br /> for arrowheads or any signs of life,<br /> out walking a friend’s ranch with Abraham,<br /> the land a maze of dry arroyos, slabs<br /> of pale rock, the flints exposed by weather.</p> <p>There too the terrible remains of winter,<br /> dead cattle caught in a raging blizzard<br /> lay unthawed in postures of resignation.<br /> I was so intent on treasure that I stumbled<br /> into a ditch and fell across the corpse<br /> of a calf the wild coyotes dined upon,<br /> a gutted leathery thing—it had a face<br /> and I started backwards, stifling a scream.</p> <p>What was I? Twelve years old? The age I dreamed<br /> Luisa Mole out foraging for water….<br /> On our visits south<br /> I begged to be taken to the mesa country<br /> as if those afternoons on skeletal land<br /> put me in touch with some essential code,<br /> the remnants of a people who moved through,<br /> migrating hunters five millennia past.</p> <p>Look for a bench, land flat enough to camp on,<br /> a nearby source of water—there you’d find<br /> the silicates in flakes, clear fracture marks<br /> where fletchers made their tools, the midden washed<br /> by wind and flash floods all across the scarp.<br /> Nothing remained in place here. Even trees<br /> had shallow roots. In <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/dust-bowl"><strong>dustbowl</strong></a> days my father<br /> picked up points by the dozen on this land,</p> <p>pot-hunting like his neighbors, half in love<br /> with science, more with the electric touch<br /> of hands across receded seas of time.<br /> What had we found? I knew this evidence<br /> of other lives had meaning of some sort.<br /> I saw the strangers, grew among them for years<br /> in my own mind. But was it love or envy?<br /> Was it only pride of place? A kind of theft?</p> <p>Always looking at the ground beneath my boots,<br /> always listening for the call of Abraham<br /> who’d find a point and let me think I found it,<br /> whose meaty, sun-burnt hands would leave the pool<br /> of wide-brimmed shade, point beyond scarred boots<br /> to the perfect knife, worked like a stone leaf<br /> and left there by the ancient wanderers,<br /> original, aboriginal, and magic.</p> <p>Excerpt from <em>Ludlow: A Verse Novel </em>(Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2007)</p> <h3>Horse People</h3> <p>When Quanah Parker’s mother as a young girl<br /> saw her family lanced and hacked to pieces,<br /> and was herself thrown on the hurtling rump<br /> of a warrior’s pony whipped to the far off<br /> and utterly unwritten <strong>Comancheria</strong>,<br /> the little blond began her life, outcast<br /> only when the whites recaptured her and killed<br /> the man she loved, the father of her children.</p> <p>The language she forgot would call her ruined<br /> and beyond redemption like the young she suckled,<br /> among them the “last Chief of the Comanche,”<br /> a man who died in comforts his mother spurned,<br /> but who, like her, remembered how the manes<br /> of the remuda caught the breezes as they ran,<br /> and how the grass caught fire in the scalp-red sun.</p> <p>First published in <em>The Southwest Review</em></p> <h3>Hangman</h3> <p>A Big Chief tablet and a Bic<br /> between us on the car’s back seat,the scaffold drawn, and underneath<br /> a code of dashes in a row<br /> for seven letters. Part of a stick-<br /> figure fixed to the noose’s O</p> <p>for every letter missed, until<br /> if I’m not careful my poor guy<br /> will hang with x’s for his eyes.<br /> My brother parlays his resource<br /> for big boy words with taunting skill:<br /> “It starts with <em>d</em> and rhymes with <em>force</em>.”</p> <p>But I don’t know the word, don’t know<br /> the wet world being slapped away<br /> by wiper blades, or why the day<br /> moved like an old stop-action film<br /> or an interrupted TV show<br /> about a family on the lam.</p> <p>I let myself be hanged, and learn<br /> a new word whispered out of fear,<br /> though it will be another year<br /> before I feel the house cut loose,<br /> my dangling body and the burn<br /> of shame enclosing like a noose.</p> <p>First published in <em>The Times Literary Supplement</em></p> <h3>Descend</h3> <p>And what of those who have no voice<br /> and no belief, dumbstruck and hurt by love,<br /> no bathysphere to hold them in the depths?<br /> Descend with them and learn and be reborn<br /> to the changing light. We all began without it,<br /> and some were loved and some forgot the love.<br /> Some withered into hate and made a living<br /> hating and rehearsing hate until they died.<br /> The shriveled ones, chatter of the powerful—<br /> they all go on. They go on. You must descend<br /> among the voiceless where you have a voice,<br /> barely a whisper, unheard by most, a wave<br /> among the numberless waves, a weed torn<br /> from the sandy bottom. Here you are. Begin.</p> <p>From <em>The Sound: New and Selected Poems </em>(2018)</p> <h3>Bristlecone Pine</h3> <p>If wind were wood it might resemble this<br /> fragility and strength, old bark bleeding amber.<br /> Its living parts grow on away from the dead<br /> as we do in our lesser lives. Endurance,<br /> yes, but also a scarred and twisted beauty<br /> we know the way we know our own carved hearts.</p> <p>First published in <em>Valparaiso Poetry Review</em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/literature" hreflang="en">Literature</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/psychology" hreflang="en">Psychology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/writing" hreflang="en">Writing</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/us-history-0" hreflang="en">US History</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-history" hreflang="en">colorado history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/geography" hreflang="en">Geography</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/civicspolitics" hreflang="en">Civics/Politics</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> Wed, 23 Jan 2019 21:54:22 +0000 yongli 3024 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Kyle Laws http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/kyle-laws <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Kyle Laws</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2018-12-13T09:45:57-07:00" title="Thursday, December 13, 2018 - 09:45" class="datetime">Thu, 12/13/2018 - 09:45</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/kyle-laws" data-a2a-title="Kyle Laws"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fkyle-laws&amp;title=Kyle%20Laws"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Kyle Laws" src="/sites/default/files/Kyle_Laws.jpg" style="width: 450px; height: 469px;" /></p> <p>Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/pueblo-0"><strong>Pueblo</strong></a>. Her collections include <em>This Town: Poems of Correspondence </em>with Jared Smith (Lafayette, CO: Liquid Light Press, 2017); <em>So Bright to Blind </em>(Five Oaks Press, 2015); <em>Wildwood </em>(Lummox Press, 2014); <em>My Visions Are As Real As Your Movies, Joan of Arc Says to Rudolph Valentino </em>(Dancing Girl Press, 2013); and <em>George Sand’s Haiti</em> (co-winner of Poetry West’s 2012 award).&nbsp; With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press<em>.&nbsp; </em></p> <h2>Poems</h2> <h3>Deer Dance Taos Pueblo</h3> <p>A Pueblo woman stretches her hand<br /> from the circle to skins draped<br /> on dancers as they pass by,<br /> her gnarled fingers stroking wet musky<br /> fur of fresh antelope and deer.<br /> Each time she reaches past my shoulder,<br /> I feel my grandmother’s swollen fingers<br /> in my waist-length hair, twisting<br /> it high on my head in summer,<br /> sunburned ends red against<br /> winter black strands, or when<br /> the sun dipped to the bay's horizon,<br /> Ordelia at the dining room window<br /> starching white blouses till cotton<br /> scratched like sand of July beaches.&nbsp;<br /> It's the movement of her hands braided<br /> with the rhythm of this Christmas day,<br /> the dance of old hands as they reach<br /> into dark hair and fresh skin.</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>“Deer Dance Taos Pueblo” appeared in <em>Caprice, They Recommend This Place, </em>and <em>Wildwood.</em><em> </em></p> <h3>I Walk the Abyss</h3> <p>A road of amethyst asters &amp; chamisa.&nbsp;<br /> I walk to the pungent smell of sage.<br /> There is a catch in my ribs<br /> like the catch of a roller coaster<br /> climbing the white painted web.<br /> You can hear screams<br /> as the click of teeth pulls cars<br /> around a banked corner,<br /> into the abyss.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>It is easier to be here,&nbsp;<br /> because deep under<br /> in the slough of water,<br /> or high above in the painted web,<br /> I cannot carry the lizard in my hands.&nbsp;<br /> He neither likes underground waterways<br /> or the salt-stained air.&nbsp;<br /> He seeks sides of hills<br /> red with the turning of leaves.<br /> The sea is still warm.&nbsp;<br /> The air has not yet changed it.<br /> There is a disequilibrium,<br /> an unbalance between the two.<br /> I cannot hold the lizard in my hands,&nbsp;<br /> flesh the only color it cannot change to.&nbsp;<br /> I will have to stay&nbsp;<br /> while the lizard finds his way<br /> between my hands and autumn's leaves.</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>“I Walk the Abyss” appeared in <em>Poetry While You Wait </em>and <em>Wildwood.</em></p> <h3>How Do I Tell You About the September Day</h3> <p>The sky was the blue of a child's crayon drawing,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the clouds spider dreams.</p> <p>Huajatolla Peaks were a fifth grade diorama<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; of mountains in Central America.</p> <p>The scrub oak was 70's shag carpeting<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; in orange, red and brown.</p> <p>The Camaro took <strong>La Veta Pass</strong><br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; like a needle threading lace.</p> <p>Red shoes of the flamenco dancer<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; shimmered outside Doc Martin's.</p> <p>The dress' white fringe glistened<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; on her skin.</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>“How Do I Tell You About the September Day” appeared in <em>Times of Sorrow/Times of Grace: Writing by Women of the Great Plains-High Plains </em>and <em>Wildwood.</em></p> <h3>White Shaggy Cattle</h3> <p>Herded down the road<br /> over the Rio Grande Gorge,<br /> fur thick with winter,<br /> small mangy dog to the side<br /> of a young man with a stick,<br /> a caballero,<br /> tall, lanky, a mustached face,<br /> dark eyes like bullfighters<br /> from posters of Mexico;<br /> only it's too cold for calf-length red pants,<br /> a sequined vest,<br /> but the hat is large,<br /> a wide brim to match the mustache,<br /> all bringing up the rear of this cattle train<br /> moving to the Gorge,<br /> snow dusting the ridge.</p> <p>As the cut tumbles to the Rio Grande,<br /> and thick coats of white cattle<br /> brush chamisa &amp; sage,<br /> we motor toward warm running springs,<br /> step down slowly,<br /> one foot at a time<br /> into the iron waters,<br /> steam rising up to belly and breasts,<br /> washing over shoulders,<br /> welcome warmth of the room<br /> enclosed beneath petroglyph-carved cliffs,<br /> the writings of code,<br /> recordings of movements of people,<br /> a small stick-man,<br /> a caballero,<br /> arm raised<br /> to the running of antelope &amp; deer.</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <h3>Light and Shadow</h3> <p>Low winter light flickers through<br /> cottonwoods as I walk a boardwalk<br /> on Ranchitos Road, the Harwood no longer<br /> a library where I can pull down books,<br /> but a gallery like every other in Taos:<br /> small rooms and curved walls.</p> <p>The flicker of light blinds me<br /> to all but the impression of limbs,<br /> towering and like the clack of a train<br /> on a track, recurrent, having its own<br /> rhythm that only a conductor can interpret,<br /> a music of light, a strobe, a sunlight my<br /> eyes only slightly register as they did<br /> in the arcade in front of the ballroom<br /> where I hand-cranked the nickelodeon<br /> and saw carriages on the boardwalk<br /> in an Easter parade, or maybe it was<br /> the sun over the pram's hood as Kay<br /> strolled in her hat and the judge<br /> called out winners over the public<br /> address system, wind blowing tassels<br /> back and forth in front of my eyes as<br /> I turned my face to a warming sun.</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>“Light and Shadow” appeared in <em>Abbey, Midnight Train to Dodge,</em> and <em>Wildwood.</em></p> <h3>I Am Coming Home to Wildwood Villas</h3> <p>My hair was yellow that summer,<br /> yellow to match my waitress uniform.<br /> It was dark and thick above my eyes,<br /> one long eyebrow.<br /> They put a man on the moon<br /> while I waited for a bus<br /> with wooden benches,<br /> lit Salems from a sand-crushed pack,<br /> deep breath of menthol<br /> drifting out the window<br /> as we pulled from the station,<br /> passed fishing boats tied up at docks,<br /> <em>pink in morning, sailor's warning,<br /> pink at night, sailor's delight,</em><br /> reciting what I’d been taught,<br /> a shade paler than red.</p> <p>In evening people streamed<br /> to the bulkhead to watch sunsets<br /> at the top of New Jersey Avenue,<br /> drink quarter beers at Smitty's Bar,<br /> sand drifting on plank floors<br /> and under the shuffleboard's rings,<br /> voices growing with night,<br /> flounder moving up the bay.</p> <p>I am coming home.<br /> There is still a long walk up<br /> a street moist with the sun's baking.<br /> Tar stains the bottom of my shoes.<br /> I have tried for days&nbsp;<br /> to remember that sailor's refrain.<br /> It is only as I walk into morning<br /> that I know it is about a warning,<br /> about a storm not yet here.</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>&nbsp;“I Am Coming Home to Wildwood Villas” appeared in <em>They Recommend This Place,</em> the broadside <em>Kyle’s Clam Chowder, </em>and <em>Wildwood.</em></p> <h3>Crossing</h3> <p><em>And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are<br /> more to me, and more in my meditations,<br /> than you might suppose.</em></p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; —Walt Whitman&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>I took a ferry to Walt Whitman's,<br /> continued on down the Delaware Bay<br /> to a few miles above the Point, then<br /> ran with small steps, arms outstretched into<br /> the sunset, like a sandpiper just before flight.<br /> I heard a foghorn against clouds,<br /> saw the silhouetted shape of a ferry<br /> moving across the bay, and knew I was<br /> to spend the night in the crossing.</p> <p>And so I boarded, took a seat alone in back,<br /> felt the tremor of engines as we backed<br /> into the canal, backed into a cherry ice sunset.<br /> At first it was the pink of sailor's delight,<br /> but as a slight wind rustled,<br /> as a chill whispered at my ears,<br /> it became the cherry ice served by<br /> a woman under a pastel striped umbrella<br /> at the bottom of Pennsylvania Avenue,<br /> hand reaching into a metal cylinder<br /> with a scoop.</p> <p>Thirty years ago I was on the inaugural voyage,<br /> crossing the bay that only our kites<br /> when cut from their thread journeyed over.&nbsp;<br /> Now, wrapped in an old man's camel hair coat,<br /> I carry red and gold leaves of oak from the walk<br /> to Walt Whitman's.</p> <p>There's a ferry to cross over<br /> from Camden to Philadelphia,<br /> a ferry to cross over<br /> from Cape May to Lewes;<br /> there's the parting of water,&nbsp;<br /> the wake.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>“Crossing” appeared in <em>To Life! Occasions of Praise </em>and <em>Wildwood.</em></p> <h3>Debris</h3> <p>Yesterday, I walked<br /> the beach of the Villas<br /> gathering debris.<br /> When I started out<br /> it was only<br /> an unbroken tiny pink pearl shell,<br /> a small quilled seagull feather,<br /> a blue clawed crab's pincher,<br /> and the back of its coral rimmed shell.<br /> But then there was<br /> the grey tipped gull feather,<br /> and a baby horseshoe crab the color<br /> of iced coffee with cream.&nbsp;<br /> Soon my hands were full<br /> and I wanted more:<br /> the numbered dock floats tangled<br /> in marine line,<br /> and a blue and yellow coil of rope.<br /> When I lifted it up<br /> I found it connected to<br /> seaweed and salt grass<br /> by a fishing line.<br /> Only for a moment<br /> did I think of untangling<br /> what I wanted from<br /> what it was attached to.<br /> Then I knew I couldn't.<br /> I could no more untangle<br /> the fishing line<br /> from the coil of colored rope<br /> than I could untangle myself<br /> from a foghorn's wail at sunset,<br /> sandbars stretching out long at low tide,<br /> the weathered wood siding of Smitty's Bar,<br /> or the steps to sand swept away in a storm.</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>“Debris” appeared in <em>Chiron Review, Unexpected Harvest – A Gathering of Blessings, </em>and <em>Wildwood.</em></p> <h3>My Room of Aloneness and Quarantine</h3> <p>In a back bedroom off the living room<br /> with green wallpaper,<br /> a whole summer closed up<br /> with blond furniture.&nbsp;<br /> I had whooping cough,<br /> had to be isolated, quarantined.&nbsp;<br /> The only contact I had<br /> was when I coughed so hard<br /> they turned me upside down<br /> over the bed to stop.&nbsp;<br /> At night, it was worse.<br /> Days were spent looking out the window<br /> at the lot children played in next door.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>The room I now sleep in<br /> was used as a quarantine in the 30s,&nbsp;<br /> the father coming and going through<br /> the window my headboard butts up against.&nbsp;<br /> One summer, I slept with the window open,<br /> feared someone breaking in, got a cough.<br /> I wanted the window open,<br /> a breeze blowing through&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> as it hadn’t that summer on the bay.</p> <p>I dreamed of wandering down to the shore,&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> riding waves under the moon,<br /> lights from Smitty's Bar<br /> casting stripes on the sand,&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> Mabel the piano player belting songs,&nbsp;<br /> 25 cent beers, shuffleboard, plank floors,&nbsp;<br /> cheese steaks on the back grill<br /> sprinkled generously with black pepper,&nbsp;<br /> tide pounding the bulkhead,&nbsp;<br /> boats pulled from moorings,&nbsp;<br /> slim poles in sand,&nbsp;<br /> pier off the Fishing Club,&nbsp;<br /> or the rail boats were launched from into low tide,&nbsp;<br /> docks in harbors off the canal,&nbsp;<br /> ferry boats following flight of my lost kite,&nbsp;<br /> music and voices drifting into<br /> my room by the sea,<br /> my room of aloneness and quarantine.&nbsp;</p> <p>Even now I want to rise with voices into night,&nbsp;<br /> glide across cool sand,&nbsp;<br /> break into the bait locker at Abananni's Pier,&nbsp;<br /> cast my line under the stream of moon,&nbsp;<br /> rest on the bottom in tide rippled sand,&nbsp;<br /> wait for a flounder to carry me deeper,&nbsp;<br /> run the wake of the ferry<br /> following my yellow kite,&nbsp;<br /> surface in diesel fumed docks where<br /> I once marked the progress of tides.&nbsp;</p> <p>I struggle to stay awake.&nbsp;<br /> It has been a long night testing tides.<br /> I fall into sounds like into the yellow<br /> and red marker found many years earlier<br /> in the hull of a wrecked ship in winter,&nbsp;<br /> instructions saying to report its finding&nbsp;<br /> to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.&nbsp;<br /> They too were marking tides,&nbsp;<br /> the flow of bodies in depths of the sea.&nbsp;</p> <p>They put out a beacon.&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> I am to return,&nbsp;<br /> climb back through the window,&nbsp;<br /> hide under covers,&nbsp;<br /> seal the room,&nbsp;<br /> the pull of tide,&nbsp;<br /> of voices on the bay stronger.&nbsp;<br /> I plumb the bottom with flounder.&nbsp;<br /> I am developing gills.&nbsp;<br /> What will they say when they take down<br /> the covers to bathe me?&nbsp;<br /> They will know I have been<br /> in this closed off room by the sea<br /> too long.&nbsp;</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>“My Room of Aloneness and Quarantine” appeared in <em>Poetry Motel </em>and <em>Wildwood.</em></p> <h3>Wildwood</h3> <p>I get on the El in North Philadelphia,<br /> not far from Tulip Street<br /> where Father died by<br /> the posts of the ramps<br /> to the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.<br /> I sway with the clickety-clack of<br /> the car pushing &amp; pulling on the tracks<br /> between closed windows<br /> in the second story brick.</p> <p>I want a woman with dark brown hair<br /> to open one of those windows,<br /> lean out with her breasts<br /> brushing the fire escape,<br /> and hand me a flower.<br /> I want papaya &amp; mango juice served<br /> by the young man sitting next to me.<br /> I want Miami in April,<br /> and Wildwood in August.<br /> I want Elvis on South Street,<br /> and a big long car heading for New Orleans.<br /> I want branches of magnolia<br /> through an open window of<br /> the St. Charles Street trolley,<br /> cooked seafood in the hot wind,<br /> and lips under the cream awning<br /> of the Avenue Cafe.<br /> I want to watch green grow under the door<br /> of shotgun houses,<br /> what pierces right through<br /> and holds you there,<br /> Jesse still in Tupelo.</p> <p>I still want to be held in that way,<br /> with mussels &amp; oysters in the air,<br /> to be wrapped in black shutters,<br /> my hair flowing up a fire escape<br /> to a Mansard roof,<br /> a woman at the top of stairs<br /> handing me a sweet southern rose.</p> <p>I want tulips in North Philadelphia,<br /> and the rhythm of the El<br /> as it holds me between freeze-frames<br /> of lovers in windows.<br /> I want the reach of blue shell crabs<br /> over the rim of a dented pot<br /> as they are dropped into boiling water.<br /> I want butter dripping down my chin<br /> as I break open the shell.<br /> I want Scott paper napkins<br /> piled up beside my elbows on<br /> a red checked tablecloth.<br /> I want to ride in a convertible<br /> down the curves of Fulling Mill Road.<br /> I want the carousel and Ferris wheel,<br /> the tunnel of love and roller coaster.<br /> I want the Days of Wine and Roses<br /> at the Strand Theatre,<br /> The Platters and Chuck Berry.<br /> I want clams on the half shell and<br /> crab sandwiches at the Shamrock Bar.<br /> I want Wildwood,<br /> the sweet Wildwood of my youth.</p> <p>Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Laws</p> <p>“Wildwood” appeared in <em>Caprice, Lummox Number One, POETS On the Line, They Recommend This Place, </em>and <em>Wildwood.</em></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/us" hreflang="en">U.S</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/history" 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<time datetime="2018-12-12T16:26:42-07:00" title="Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - 16:26" class="datetime">Wed, 12/12/2018 - 16:26</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/rita-brady-kiefer" data-a2a-title="Rita Brady Kiefer"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Frita-brady-kiefer&amp;title=Rita%20Brady%20Kiefer"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Rita Brady Kiefer" src="/sites/default/files/Rita_Brady_Kiefer.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 753px;" /></p> <p>Rita Brady Kiefer has published two full-length poetry collections—<em>Nesting Doll, </em>finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and <em>Crossing Borders</em>—and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including <em>Face to Face</em> (New York: Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux), <em>Hunger Enough</em> (Worthington, OH: Pudding House Press), <em>The Crimson Edge </em>(Goshen, CT: Chicory Blue Press), and <em>Beyond Lament</em> (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press)<em>.</em> The Ars Nova Group recorded "Like This" on <em>Soundscapes</em>. Her poems have been translated in Argentina and Spain. She has received awards from the Colorado Council on the Arts, Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute, A Puffin Foundation, and the Danforth Foundation.</p> <h2>Poems</h2> <h3>Canyons</h3> <p>In the beginning there is a fault,<br /> some new stream not knowing<br /> its own force.&nbsp; On each side stones<br /> rise from a turmoil in the clay.</p> <p>For eons they burn, the water moves&nbsp;<br /> so naturally no one sees<br /> those rocks keep dividing.</p> <p>Then one day: a canyon.</p> <p>Copyright 1993 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Unveiling </em>(Crimson Edge Chapbooks, Chicory Blue Press)</p> <h3>Like This</h3> <p><em>Don’t try to explain the miracle, kiss me<br /> on the lips, like this, like this.<br /> &nbsp; &nbsp;-- Rumi</em></p> <p>Not the way father kissed mother<br /> on the cheek, not in the front of the house,<br /> no, in the back, in the bedroom, basement, in<br /> those dark places, those under the earth<br /> places no one can see, kiss me<br /> across mountains when we are apart, kiss me<br /> under sly sheets after the trace of a late shower<br /> kiss me the sweet, sweet kiss of the glad-we-are-married<br /> on the lips.&nbsp;&nbsp; Once more.&nbsp;&nbsp; Once more.&nbsp;&nbsp; Kiss me<br /> on the ear, not like the grackle or Canada jay<br /> saying what’s on its mind, like the hummingbird<br /> laughing at gravity.&nbsp;&nbsp; Kiss me slow, not the way<br /> aging bones explain marrow to each other<br /> winter mornings.&nbsp;&nbsp; No.&nbsp;&nbsp; Slow.&nbsp;&nbsp; Like a late June<br /> two-step.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I know&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I know: time is<br /> the only kiss that lasts, but<br /> just now — tonight — make me&nbsp;<br /> believe the miracle of lips<br /> like this&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; like this</p> <p>Copyright 1999 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Nesting Doll</em> (University Press of Colorado)</p> <h3>Trying On Faces&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</h3> <p><em>for Alice</em></p> <p>Your mother went mad at the delivery<br /> they told her not to hold you<br /> not to look at your missing face, the tiny blind lids<br /> that could have belonged to some prodigal fish,<br /> an oval membrane spewing mucous<br /> where a mouth and nose could have cast a spell<br /> over your mother.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Six years later like fickle gods<br /> surgeons are still trying faces on you.<br /> This time they built you a voice box<br /> but you shrieked two nights and days<br /> before they found they had blocked those original ears,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; your only way to the world.<br /> Across a hospital hall I lie<br /> hardly missing the part of my body they have taken.<br /> In my leisure robe I try on faces<br /> until I am your mother standing over your sorry body &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> only two of us in the room<br /> something sharp gleaming in my hand.<br /> Over and over I read you<br /> stories of magic wands.&nbsp;&nbsp; I tell myself<br /> <em>this is what I am holding now, </em><br /> I see myself casting a spell to wake you whole<br /> or shrink you back, a tiny tadpole<br /> silver and shining in the original sea.</p> <p>Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Crossing Borders </em>(Meridian Noon Press)</p> <h3>Bristlecone Pine</h3> <p>In the beginning mad particles sliced their<br /> trunks bare on the windward side, now<br /> visitors count the annual <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/tree-ring-dating-0">wood rings</a></strong> on<br /> the world's oldest bodies, my own aging<br /> beside them on <strong>Mt. Bross</strong> near <strong>Breckenridge</strong><br /> where air thins at twelve thousand feet.</p> <p>My native husband calls them character trees.<br /> I say they wear the look of dissidents,<br /> émigrés, these stunned trees<br /> leaning like years - all the same way -<br /> mavericks thriving on exposed plains.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Or old reruns?&nbsp; Look. There. A silhouette:<br /> Charlie Chaplin leaving.&nbsp;&nbsp; And twisted<br /> together, Sacco and Vanzetti tracking<br /> Rosa Parks who juts solo trying to hear,<br /> somewhere in those trees’ thousand years,<br /> Benazir Bhutto, Malala and<br /> Dvorak whistling a new world<br /> no one has to flee</p> <p>Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Crossing Borders </em>(Meridian Noon Press)</p> <h3>Campfire</h3> <p><em>(fancy is indeed less than a present palpable<br /> &nbsp;reality, but it is greater than remembrance)<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;</em>—John Keats&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>The air hangs damp tonight.&nbsp; And cold.<br /> Under the tarp, even parched twigs or<br /> logs we stack before dark shudder&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> no hope for a generous blaze<br /> to warm by, only the gossip of<br /> small tongues following one of us&nbsp;<br /> from the city.</p> <p>I want a bonfire to burn a conspiracy<br /> of years, to separate faces<br /> but here on the <strong>Great Divide</strong><br /> the thin oxygen dims our sight<br /> and night-sparks distract<br /> like wrong names flaming for attention.</p> <p>All the past cuttings, the black and white ash.&nbsp;<br /> <em>Leave them here,</em> you say, <em>in <strong>Buena Vista</strong>.</em>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> (continued)</p> <p>I ask what you see in the late embers.&nbsp;<br /> You stare then venture <em>ears!&nbsp; deer ears! </em>&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> We laugh and the last flame loses.&nbsp;<br /> Fancy.&nbsp; Something is ending.</p> <p>Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Crossing Borders </em>(Meridian Noon Press)</p> <h3>Shadows</h3> <p><em>for Jerry</em></p> <p>We stand at the edge<br /> of the river clear as our intentions<br /> looking for <strong>trout</strong>:<br /> voyeurs, not fishers today.</p> <p>You speak of silver lengths<br /> that flash at you quick and bright<br /> like meteors we watched<br /> from the grass last week<br /> only the blades between us.</p> <p>I see merely shadows<br /> at the bottom of the bed.<br /> On this mountain pass<br /> my lungs, wild beasts<br /> trapped and struggling in their cage<br /> fight twelve thousand feet<br /> of thin air.</p> <p>Tonight before our tent<br /> separates us from the stars<br /> we'll light a fire and<br /> my tongue will wash you clean.</p> <p>I love what the moon does to you.<br /> You stand repeated on the ground.</p> <p>Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Crossing Borders </em>(Meridian Noon Press)</p> <h3>Torn Photo</h3> <p>What were you wearing that day<br /> he snapped the picture?&nbsp; Half<br /> a century ago you tore your face from<br /> the photo, the only trace: a slim arm<br /> arcing your small daughter like a covenant.</p> <p>Propped on the blanket the baby scowls<br /> as if even then, she saw a pose<br /> behind the lens: that man<br /> who wanted you to give him a son.</p> <p><em>The Egyptian Book of Dreams</em> speaks of<br /> a loss of face.&nbsp; In sleep<br /> I look for the woman you canceled.<br /> For years I could not forgive that tearing<br /> (continued)<br /> but now I am a woman<br /> it is clearer.&nbsp; We are taught to veil our faces<br /> to keep them from our daughters.</p> <p>For years I’ve rummaged to find you<br /> in things I buried the thin summer<br /> you died: your letters in that black steamer<br /> trunk, the velvet evening bag you gave me<br /> for dress-up, a gold compact mirror cracked<br /> in three, tucked in the folds of<br /> an apricot silk you might have worn<br /> as hope for your absent body that day.</p> <p>And - wherever it is - the other part of that picture.</p> <p>Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Crossing Borders </em>(Meridian Noon Press)</p> <h3>Grammar Lesson</h3> <p>All my life I’d been <em>he</em>, the pronoun<br /> that followed a linking verb in all<br /> seventh-grade samples, the object lying<br /> under the slanted preposition.<br /> I’d been the unaccented ending<br /> our language calls <em>feminine.</em>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> But I can’t talk the way they taught me<br /> my voice box jams, threatens to go <em>mute</em>.&nbsp;<br /> My tongue seizes words, flips them<br /> inside out ’til they translate: <em>life</em>.</p> <p>Think the field of female energy<br /> a whole new word-mass exploding<br /> like scarlet poppies tossing in the wind<br /> spreading their messy seeds.&nbsp; Think<br /> the changing of passive voice to active,<br /> shaping the question mark to an imperative.&nbsp;<br /> Soon every delicious letter would taste right<br /> through female lips and I could be<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; intransitive or better still<br /> what comes before the verb:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> the word that shapes the meaning.&nbsp;</p> <p>Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Crossing Borders </em>(Meridian Noon Press)</p> <h3>Lost and Found</h3> <p>Like the strand of pearls Mama tossed<br /> across the room that night, little white<br /> zeros spilling like years on the drain board<br /> down the sink, into the Rushleigh Road living<br /> room, bouncing to the frayed love seat<br /> under the baby-grand she didn’t play anymore<br /> through the hall to the bedroom armoire<br /> that consoled the silks she’d stopped wearing.&nbsp;<br /> The house rained pearls that night she slumped<br /> on the bathroom floor, her five-year-old<br /> counting the octagon tiles, trying London<br /> Derry Aire in several keys to lull or wake<br /> her.&nbsp; Next day we tried to collect them<br /> in the live music box, some were<br /> <em>deliberately hiding,</em> she said.</p> <p>At my wedding and other choice times<br /> pearls in each ear, at my throat<br /> a single strand.</p> <p>Mama, see, I found them.</p> <p>Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Crossing Borders </em>(Meridian Noon Press)</p> <h3>Experts</h3> <p>River trips ruined through the binoculars<br /> of the resident Audubon authority<br /> her litany fating the birds<br /> or hikes through canyons diminished<br /> as the Guide expounds<br /> confirming the stones<br /> (in tenth grade biology<br /> I wanted to be the amoeba​<br /> not diagram it)<br /> and those literary priests<br /> from their altar of truth<br /> ordaining theory as history<br /> we keep getting it wrong<br /> experts don't name things<br /> they stammer their love.</p> <p>Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer</p> <p>From <em>Nesting Doll</em> (University Press of Colorado)</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * 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'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> Wed, 12 Dec 2018 23:26:42 +0000 yongli 2985 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Art Goodtimes http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/art-goodtimes <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Art Goodtimes</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2018-12-12T15:02:34-07:00" title="Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - 15:02" class="datetime">Wed, 12/12/2018 - 15:02</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/art-goodtimes" data-a2a-title="Art Goodtimes"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fart-goodtimes&amp;title=Art%20Goodtimes"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/Art_Goodtimes.jpg" style="height:750px; width:525px" /></p> <p>Art Goodtimes&nbsp;of Norwood won a Colorado Council on the Arts poetry fellowship 29 years ago and served two years as <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/western-slope"><strong>Western Slope</strong></a> Poet Laureate. His most recent book is<em>&nbsp;Looking South to Lone Cone: the Cloud Acre Poems</em>&nbsp;(Sedona, AZ: Western Eye Press, 2013).</p> <h2>Poems</h2> <h3>Skinning the Elk</h3> <p>“There’s a whole lot of life in these animals”<br /> George nods, almost like a prayer<br /> as I hold the hoofed leg<br /> steady for the knife<br /> Mist rising from the gutted belly<br /> Skin still warm</p> <p>Tempered steel peels back<br /> thick hide. Fur<br /> The dark meat of the interior</p> <p>Secret organs slide steaming into full moonlight<br /> on the bed of Greenbank’s battered pickup</p> <p>I can’t stop peering<br /> into the glazed crystal<br /> of those antlered eyes</p> <p>Two perfect rivets<br /> welded to the girder of that<br /> skeletal moment when<br /> the bullet’s magic<br /> cut life short</p> <p>Later<br /> after the carcass is hung<br /> in a cottonwood tree<br /> I go inside to wash my hands<br /> But the blood won’t come off</p> <p>And there’s no mistake<br /> I am marked for life<br /> I wear the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/rocky-mountain-elk"><strong>elk</strong></a>’s tattoo</p> <p>As its meat becomes my meat<br /> &amp; its blood stains my blood</p> <p>Spirit leaping<br /> from shape to shape</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>This poem was first published in the anthology <em>Wingbone: Poetry From Colorado</em>, eds. Janice Hays and Pamela Haines (Colorado Springs: Sudden Jungle Press, 1986).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h3>At the Gate</h3> <p><em>—for Budada</em></p> <p>It’s not that I hate<br /> tradition<br /> Just the opposite</p> <p>I’m all tangled up<br /> in the quirks &amp; muons<br /> of the historical record</p> <p>As a peripatetic youth<br /> I walked the Latin of Catullus</p> <p><em>Odi et amo</em></p> <p>Chanted the chorus of frogs<br /> with Aristophanes</p> <p><a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=brekekeke%5Cc&amp;la=greek&amp;can=brekekeke%5Cc0&amp;prior=*ba/traxoi" target="morph">βρεκεκεκὲξ</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=koa%5Cc&amp;la=greek&amp;can=koa%5Cc0&amp;prior=brekekeke\c" target="morph">κοὰξ</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=koa%2Fc&amp;la=greek&amp;can=koa%2Fc0&amp;prior=koa\c" target="morph">κοάξ</a></p> <p>Like Hopkins I did my penance<br /> before the twisted ivy altars<br /> of the Academy</p> <p>Memorized the classics<br /> Ran gangs as a literary felon<br /> chained to the West’s Lit tsunamis</p> <p>Homer. Vergil. Dylan. Yeats<br /> ’Til I found the hovering bird gods<br /> Now I try to</p> <p>do like Sappho did<br /> Dare to sing like a Clipper ship<br /> in a time of triremes</p> <p>To be blown by the Wind<br /> in all its gusts<br /> &amp; bombogenesis​</p> <p>Following ahead<br /> of the 8-ball of rhyme<br /> but hoping to weave behind</p> <p>a thread of spun gut argot<br /> felt through the poked fabric<br /> of our Sanskrit scifi street slang</p> <p>And may we too be led into<br /> the deep Apollonian temptation of<br /> unstrung high peak epiphanies</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes​</p> <h3>After Li Po</h3> <p>The birds<br /> have long lifted up<br /> as a flock &amp; flown</p> <p>Only a lonely Cloud floats by</p> <p>The Two of us<br /> lost in our looking<br /> the Mountain &amp; I</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>This poem has been widely performed, and has appeared in the <em>Montrose Mirror</em>, the <em>Four Corners Free Press</em> and the <em>Telluride Watch</em>.</p> <h3>Learning to Smile</h3> <p><em>"I follow Freud's opinion that at birth there is no consciousness, accordingly,<br /> there can be no awareness or conscious experience ... Thus it is rare<br /> to find the smiling response before the third month of life."</em></p> <p>—Rene Spitz, <em>The First Year of Life:<br /> A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant<br /> Development of Object Relations</em></p> <p>Floating in the sac<br /> I sucked the blood of my mother's cigarettes<br /> Her breath fed me</p> <p>When kicking in her belly I began<br /> to make my move, they rushed her<br /> fast car &amp; sirens<br /> to a monolith of brick<br /> Laid her flat on a gurney<br /> &amp; wheeled her helpless<br /> into the sterile room of deliveries</p> <p>We both felt the sudden vertigo<br /> the whirl &amp; loss<br /> as the anaesthetic took effect</p> <p>Unconscious<br /> drugged into dreams<br /> she was made to push me<br /> out of the house her body had been</p> <p>Unconscious<br /> I slid head-first<br /> into the assault of their bright lights<br /> forceps, antiseptics</p> <p>A masked man held me captive<br /> upside down</p> <p>Too soon his rubber gloves<br /> cut the cord that pumped me<br /> mother's air mixed with blood</p> <p>Too soon<br /> My face turning blue<br /> asphyxiated, brain throbbing<br /> until those brusque hands<br /> hung me by my heels<br /> &amp; slapped the life into me</p> <p>Still groggy from the drugs<br /> was it any wonder that I cried out<br /> howling at the world?</p> <p>Raw atmosphere jammed my lungs<br /> Silver nitrate burnt into my eyes</p> <p>I was born craving nicotine<br /> &amp; the smell of her skin</p> <p>But they hauled me away<br /> to be tagged, guarded<br /> &amp; quarantined</p> <p>My own father, criminal with germs<br /> allowed only a peek through glass<br /> at his first-born son</p> <p>There in the nursery<br /> tended by strange, masked women<br /> I was given a blanket to calm my fear</p> <p>So my first bond was made<br /> with impersonal cloth</p> <p>First comfort found in hugging the material<br /> close around me<br /> as later in times of stress I would grab hold<br /> of objects as though they<br /> could help soothe the loss &amp; aching</p> <p>There in the arms of obstetrics<br /> my heart dangling from the thread of<br /> its own frightened beat, I slept<br /> &amp; slept &amp; slept</p> <p>My body retreating into shock<br /> that instinctual safety valve<br /> releasing me<br /> from the merciless onslaught of<br /> modern technology</p> <p>And then they wondered<br /> why I cried<br /> when they hauled me back<br /> to the birthsmell of the Mother</p> <p>Why I couldn't focus<br /> &amp; look her in the eye</p> <p>Why it was months<br /> before I learned<br /> to smile</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>This poem has been widely performed and was first published in a chapbook co-authored with Judyth Hill, <em>Altar of the Ordinary</em> (Farmington, NM: Yoo Hoo Press, 1993).</p> <h3>Seeing Bear</h3> <p>Walking Petersburg Creek</p> <p>the Tlingit's <em>Seetkah Heenuk'w</em></p> <p>across the Wrangel Narrows</p> <p>from the mud-flat sloughs of Mitkof Island</p> <p>I pass the last cabin</p> <p>last sign</p> <p>last mark on the map</p> <p>&amp; come upon brown steaming mounds of berry scat</p> <p>Piles of gutted humpies, half-chewed, fins still twitching</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Through skunk cabbage rank with growth</p> <p>&amp; devil's club waiting in ambush</p> <p>its honed thorns prickly with menace</p> <p>I skirt innocent gooseberries</p> <p>expecting the worst</p> <p>prepared around each bend for some dark hulk</p> <p>swatting fish</p> <p>&amp; the ultimate terror of <em>Ursus horribilis</em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Thick groves of old growth</p> <p>soak up light</p> <p>&amp; squeeze out shapes.</p> <p>The stab of strange limbs</p> <p>Flicker of breeze</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>No quick exit out this maze of Sitka spruce</p> <p>Tangled arctic bog</p> <p>Muskeg carnivorous with quivering insects</p> <p>caught in the sundew's last embrace</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Lost in this still untamed Alaskan bush</p> <p>where two-leggeds have no more weight</p> <p>than the meat they carry on their bones</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Puffing my tin whistle like a Webelos</p> <p>Clapping hands</p> <p>Singing out of dread not joy</p> <p>I keep seeing the hundred hides of Death</p> <p>its snout hairy</p> <p>fangs bristling</p> <p>about to attack</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Shadows leap out at me from the bush</p> <p>Startled. Hungry</p> <p>Rearing up on hind legs</p> <p>So near I can smell their panic</p> <p>wild as fish breath</p> <p>Murder growling in their fierce gaze</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>To run or play dead?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Bruin gone berserk &amp; bounding towards me</p> <p>Slashed muscle</p> <p>The snapped arm ripped from its socket</p> <p>Claws long as Bowie knives</p> <p>Eyes like smoking volcanoes</p> <p>Its bulk crushing me into the earth</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Seeing hot flash</p> <p>my whole life engraved on a salmonberry</p> <p>ground to pulp</p> <p>in the molars of a steel-trap jaw</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Truth is</p> <p>walking that trail</p> <p>I meet no one</p> <p>Neither grizzly nor deer</p> <p>Not even a mouse munching lichen</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The air is crisp</p> <p>Clouds huddled against nameless peaks</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Perhaps</p> <p>for the first time in my life</p> <p>I am alone</p> <p>with the dark shape of myself</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This poem has been widely performed and was first published in a chapbook co-authored with Judyth Hill, <em>Altar of the Ordinary</em> (Farmington, NM: Yoo Hoo Press, 1993).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h3>The Art of Getting Lost</h3> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Okay, so there’s this hippie</p> <p>hitchhiking on the highway to <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/crested-butte"><strong>Crested Butte</strong></a></p> <p>Up pulls a Winnebago</p> <p>with Texas plates</p> <p>and the tinted window rolls down</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Excuse me, pilgrim</p> <p>Could you tell me the way</p> <p>to the nearest wilderness mall</p> <p>parking lot?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>HHHHHHey, man -- get lost!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>But before you lose it</p> <p>look closely</p> <p>because</p> <p>it's not so much you losing it</p> <p>as the place that takes you away</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It's slickrock deer trail thick with juniper</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>It's Mancos shale wild strawberry avalanche chute</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And suddenly <em>olla kala panta rei</em></p> <p>your're just another</p> <p>neopagan zenmother Budada</p> <p>Learning pandemonium</p> <p>Toking pure chaos</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Cougar in the headlights</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>Hairstreak in the rabbitbrush</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Or maybe it's at a table over breakfast</p> <p>where some resort town waitron</p> <p>Venus Kali clone takes you away</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And falling in love</p> <p>you lose it</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Take Luna in the mushrooms &amp; quackgrass</p> <p>Rolling in it on Sheep Mountain</p> <p>that first green-eyed summer</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Or take that infamous hike we took</p> <p>to the San Miguel Canyon petroglyph</p> <p>that scribed a hoop in the earth</p> <p>&amp; led us back to our beginnings</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Remember</p> <p>you can't lose</p> <p>what you haven't found</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Crouching for shelter from Shandoka's lightning &amp; ice</p> <p>Clambering hands &amp; knees up Lone Cone scree</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>One minute next-to-death</p> <p>&amp; then</p> <p>born again &amp; again &amp; again</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Rio Grande</strong> cliff shelf narrowing to goat hold</p> <p><strong>Uncompahgre</strong>'s Tabeguache pine scratched by <strong>bear</strong></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Getting so lost</p> <p>you find yourself</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Toad kachina grotto vision on Nuvatik-ya-ovi</p> <p>the San Francisco Peaks</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>Big Sur hot spring crotch-of-the-redwood full moon pool</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>Pacific Rim combers in a Salt Point storm slamming down fists</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Letting go</p> <p>enough</p> <p>not to panic</p> <p>but to play it like a tune</p> <p>whistled &amp; hummed</p> <p>as a hymn to the Mother</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Easy bro, Haleakala's charm</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>Yo, eating mangos &amp; making love</p> <p>in the sea cave at Kalalau</p> <p>takes you away</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This IS my religion</p> <p>I believe in being lost</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And everything I find on the way</p> <p><em>esta milagro</em></p> <p>&amp; what finds me</p> <p>I try to field</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Adventure not predicament</p> <p>Chasing chaos</p> <p>just as much as calm</p> <p>The only straight lines in the headwaters</p> <p>are the rifle's scope</p> <p>&amp; the map's compass</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So, scram pathfinders. Surveyors. Engineers</p> <p>Gimme the loon's zigzag walk</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Let me lose it</p> <p>I know how to use it!</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>This poem has been widely performed, annually at the Headwaters Conference at Western State Colorado University, and was first published in <em>The Geography of Hope: Poets of Colorado’s Western Slope </em>ed. David J. Rothman (Crested Butte, CO: Conundrum Press, 1998).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h3>Hu</h3> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Linnaeus wrote</p> <p>“The first step of science</p> <p>is to know one thing from another”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>but taking the world apart</p> <p>demands the even greater chne</p> <p>of putting it all together again</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Which is</p> <p>the creative yth</p> <p>of poet, dancer, worldmaker</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In his last years</p> <p>Linnaeus suffered a stroke</p> <p>&amp; it is said he who named &amp; classified</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>all the known species</p> <p>flora &amp; fauna, of his day</p> <p>forgot even his own name</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>This poem has been widely performed and was first published in the anthology <em>Earth First! Campfire Poems </em>(Tucson, AZ: Feral Press, 1998).</p> <h3>Head On, Off &amp; Still Running</h3> <p><em>You see, we are all sentenced to die.</em><br /> —Steve Clark</p> <p>“Poor Cagney imitations,” a friend calls them, this talking<br /> through teeth locked shut with pins to repair a broken jaw</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>“Sub-candylar fracture” the doc says, glancing at the x-rays<br /> that glow with shadows lit up from behind, invisible blades</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>knifing through my skull. No chance, really. Shooting<br /> round a corner in <strong>Glenwood Canyon</strong>, narrow two-lane</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>serpentine, the asphalt damp with snow. They'd been drinking<br /> “Skunked,” the fellow said, when I awoke to lights, a blur of</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>flashing red &amp; blackness. Cars stopped. My windshield<br /> shattered. A maze of flying cracks throbbing inside my head</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>“Are you alright?” Who was this helpful stranger<br /> asking questions? “All wrong,” I told myself. A dream</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>An accidental movie that suddenly I'd become the star of<br /> Extras dabbing at blood like makeup on my face. Sirens &amp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>police. Later, at the county wrecking yard, when I saw<br /> what remained of Betzi's limegreen Rabbit, fender</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>accordioned to dash, I almost burst out laughing, giddy<br /> as a child fumbling for the cookie jar, caught red-handed</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>but given a second chance. One never escapes death<br /> but after each fresh attempt, when, almost taken</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>swiftly away, then alert as razor blades, we mark<br /> the kiss of life, so easily unnoticed amid the neon &amp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>the noise -- that moment at which we greet each guest<br /> or deny them, as they come round the corner, arms</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>outstretched, longing for our embrace. Even with<br /> teeth clenched, jaws shut, tongue entrapped in bone</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I find I can talk. Words slip through all barriers. Party<br /> once again to the amazement of speech, I touch earth</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>rebounding, free to sing through the mended hoop of these hard<br /> teeth that still, for a bit longer, bite down on the world</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>This poem has been widely performed and was first published in <em>Embracing the Earth</em> (Berkeley, CA: Homeward Press, 1984).</p> <h3>Neruda</h3> <p><em>El que no comprende el amor, no sabe nada sobre el pueblo.</em><br /> —Oswaldo de la Vega</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Allende slain. Cut down by machineguns</p> <p>They call it suicide, but the world knows</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>better. And Neruda doubles up. He too dies</p> <p>his heart broken, the revolution in ashes</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Even the stones of Machu Picchu are helpless</p> <p>as the tanks of the Junta trample Santiago</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Repression floods in under the poet's feet</p> <p>His last works ruined. River diverted</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>from their banks. Compañeros tortured</p> <p>in the makeshift prison of a soccer stadium</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>They chop off the folksinger's fingers</p> <p>but he still sings. Victor Jara</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>blood weeping from his palms. His voice</p> <p>booming fearless &amp; defiant. So they shoot him</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In Spain they sent Lorca to the firing</p> <p>squad. In Russia Mayakovsky shot himself</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>But in Chile, Neruda, Neruda, red windmill</p> <p>of the Andes. He is all heart &amp; it crumples</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>at the news. Allende slain. The revolution</p> <p>in ashes. A lifetime's work turned to</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>rubble. But not washed out. No. Never!</p> <p>For the mountains, wind &amp; rivers go on</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>grinding wheat between stones, struggling</p> <p>as the people struggle, to match the rhythm</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>of his outstretched arms &amp; even in death</p> <p>he still sings. Neruda. Neruda!</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>This poem has been widely performed and was first published in <em>Embracing the Earth</em> (Berkeley: Homeward Press, 1984).</p> <h3>Roadkill Coyote</h3> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Sprawls across the centerline</p> <p>Backleg broken. Round glazed</p> <p>eyes glassy as marbles</p> <p>Unwavering, unblinking</p> <p>as the world rolls by</p> <p>now unnoticed or maybe</p> <p>all seen &amp; thus merely</p> <p>unremarkable. No fudge</p> <p>or flinch of instinct. Just</p> <p>the cold last look of it all</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I turn the car around &amp;</p> <p>go back to the body. Drag her</p> <p>off the road. Steam rises</p> <p>when I stroke her flanks</p> <p>The jaw locked open. Canine</p> <p>teeth menacing even in death</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I take out my knife, sing</p> <p>&nbsp;a death song &amp; thanking coyote</p> <p>I cut off her tail</p> <p>fur too beautiful to bury</p> <p>&amp; then pull her hind end</p> <p>deeper into the rabbitbrush</p> <p>beside the highway’s shoulder</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>All the way home, down</p> <p>the canyon &amp; up Norwood Hill</p> <p>singing her</p> <p>back into the mystery</p> <p>Copyright 13018 [2018 CE] Art Goodtimes</p> <p>This poem has been widely performed and was first published in <em>The Geography of Hope: Poets of Colorado’s Western Slope</em>, ed. David J. Rothman (Crested Butte, CO: Conundrum Press, 1998).</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/biology" hreflang="en">Biology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a 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'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> Wed, 12 Dec 2018 22:02:34 +0000 yongli 2983 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Joseph Hutchison http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/joseph-hutchison <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Joseph Hutchison</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * 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'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/joseph-hutchison" data-a2a-title="Joseph Hutchison"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fjoseph-hutchison&amp;title=Joseph%20Hutchison"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Joseph Hutchison" src="/sites/default/files/Joseph_Hutchison.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 646px;" /></p> <p>Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado (2014–2019), is the award-winning author of seventeen poetry collections, including&nbsp;<em>The World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015;&nbsp;The Satire Lounge; Marked Men;</em>&nbsp;<em>Thread of the Real</em>; and&nbsp;<em>Bed of Coals</em>. He has co-edited two poetry anthologies—the FutureCycle Press collection&nbsp;<em>Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai</em>&nbsp;(all profits to the Malala Foundation) with Andrea Watson and, with Gary Schroeder,&nbsp;<em>A Song for Occupations: Poems about the American Way of Work.</em>&nbsp;At&nbsp;the University of Denver’s University College, he directs two programs for working adults—Professional Creative Writing and Arts &amp; Culture—with courses both online and on campus. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, he now lives&nbsp;in the mountains southwest of the city&nbsp;with his wife, Iyengar yoga instructor Melody Madonna.</p> <h2>Poems&nbsp;</h2> <h3>At Willamette National Cemetery</h3> <p>—For my father</p> <p>The symmetry of this cemetery—<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; even in death<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the warriors<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> strictly formationed, at<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; supine attention. Grey<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; granite plaques flat<br /> <br /> in the drenched<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; grass. At first I thought,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <em>You deserve</em><br /> <br /> <em>something upright</em><em>—</em>something<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; marble, the faint<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; rose of just-dawn<br /> <br /> over the tarnished<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; waves you sailed<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; in what others called<br /> <br /> “The Good War.” You cared<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; nothing for monuments, though;<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;never (as I<br /> <br /> remember) used the word <em>heroic</em><br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; for anything you or<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; anyone<br /> <br /> did back then. It was just<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; unjust necessity<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; that earned you this<br /> <br /> plot, this plaque, this little flag stuck<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; in the sod a few days<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; each year. Is that why<br /> <br /> you chose this place? Preferring<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; to have your name<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; carved on flat grey<br /> <br /> stone, anchored in a slope of neatly<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; mown grass—preferring<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; to any standing slab<br /> <br /> the monumentally self-effacing<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; drift of this<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; rainy late-May mist.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>Verse-Virtual</em> and republished in <em>The World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).</p> <h3>Still’s Figure Speaks</h3> <p>—Clyfford Still’s PH-295 (1938)</p> <p>I kept trying to plead with him.<br /> No point. A spirit had his ear,<br /> some wheedling <em>Zeitgeist</em>.<br /> He couldn’t hear my shouts,<br /> my cries, my howls of anguish.<br /> I came across as a memory<br /> of wind, I think, keening<br /> out of the plains and gullies<br /> of his childhood. “Behind<br /> all my paintings stands<br /> the Figure,” he once said.<br /> Meaning me, swaddled<br /> in blue flesh, which he then<br /> ripped open to show the ribs,<br /> unhinging my jaw with his<br /> cold palette knife. Who<br /> was I to him? What threat<br /> did I pose that he felt driven<br /> to drive me like a spike<br /> through a hand, deep<br /> into the Invisible? I think<br /> he loved only essentials,<br /> as Plato, my first lover,<br /> loved Forms: <em>chairness</em>,<br /> not the chair itself. Clyfford<br /> wanted his convulsive shapes<br /> and colors to contain me,<br /> save me from touch (and so<br /> himself). He couldn’t hear,<br /> and now he’ll never. So why,<br /> I wonder, do I keep hearing<br /> my exiled voice call out:<br /> “<em>Miserere nobis,</em> dear ghost,<br /> damn you! <em>Dona nobis pacem.</em>”</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>The World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).</p> <h3>Ode to Something</h3> <p>Zero does not exist.</p> <p>—Victor Hugo, <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables/135/"><em>Les Misérables</em></a></p> <p>Why is there something<br /> rather than nothing?<br /> Because nothing<br /> never was, was ever<br /> just a trick of math<br /> that turned<br /> a placeholder<br /> into lack,<br /> into absence—<br /> and zero<br /> like a ball-peen<br /> hailstone<br /> struck<br /> a crack across<br /> the smooth windshield<br /> of speeding<br /> reason, making<br /> the mind’s eye see<br /> nothing<br /> everywhere.<br /> <br /> But nothing is nothing<br /> like something,<br /> something<br /> with its amber<br /> honeys, cabernets<br /> and cheeses,<br /> blood,<br /> blindworms,<br /> blossoms,<br /> lips, hips, hands,<br /> pain and rage,<br /> heartbreak, night-sweats,<br /> ten thousand joys<br /> intense<br /> and transient.<br /> No wonder<br /> so many dread<br /> the sheer abundance<br /> of something,<br /> its “flow of<br /> unforeseeable<br /> novelty,” endless<br /> irruption of<br /> forms and essences.<br /> How can reason hope<br /> to hang its dream<br /> of knowing all<br /> on such a flood?<br /> How feed<br /> its fantasy of mapping<br /> every last height,<br /> every depth, making<br /> both beginning and end<br /> knuckle under<br /> to understanding?<br /> Therefore:<br /> nothing. Nothing<br /> that gives something<br /> direction, an arc<br /> of action,<br /> a story,<br /> a meaning,<br /> the way deities<br /> used to do.<br /> <br /> Truth is, though, we<br /> swim in mystery<br /> reason can’t (can<br /> never) plumb:<br /> no beyond, only<br /> being and somethingness:<br /> our lives like sparks<br /> in a vast<br /> becoming,<br /> bright flecks<br /> of foam<br /> on a breakneck river,<br /> swirling in the world as is.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>The Lampeter Review</em> and subsequently published in <em>The World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).</p> <h3>A Damped-Down Fire</h3> <p>[An excerpt from “A Marked Man”]</p> <p>&nbsp;(April 21, 1865<br /> Half Past 10:00 a.m.)</p> <p>Boot-clatter out on the boardwalk’s<br /> warped pine planks—boisterous<br /> shouts and catcalls that wrench his gaze<br /> from the brew gone flat as pond water<br /> in its thick-sided mug. Soule turns,<br /> squints: the saloon door stands<br /> open onto <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/larimer-square"><strong>Larimer</strong></a> street, its mud<br /> a slops-and-horseshit pudding<br /> runny with April thaw. He leans<br /> toward it, on alert, but doesn’t rise,<br /> merely gripping the glass mug-handle,<br /> knuckles a sickly pinkish white.<br /> Afraid? No man’s stuck that slur<br /> on him, nor he on himself. Still,<br /> when he touches the dim star<br /> pinned to his duster’s black lapel,<br /> its pointed reminder—Silas Soule,<br /> Assistant Provost Marshal—his breath<br /> stalls. Does he prod himself? Insist<br /> that a brawl in the street’s his bailiwick,<br /> his duty (whatever <em>that</em> might mean<br /> in times like these)? In any case,<br /> the chair holds him fast.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Boylan,<br /> the barkeep, dragging his twisted leg<br /> like a cottonwood branch, eases<br /> to the flyblown window for a peek<br /> under the gilt-lettered words <em>Criterion<br /> Saloon, </em>then shrugs toward the marshal.<br /> Soule resumes the study of his lager.<br /> Boylan takes up the damp rag tied<br /> to his apron string and begins to wipe<br /> the nearest table.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Two months it’s been</p> <p>since Soule testified—told the horrors<br /> he’d seen at <strong>Sand Creek</strong> to the panel<br /> convened by Colonel Moonlight.<br /> A massacre, Soule called it, <strong>Chivington</strong>’s<br /> rubbing out of <strong>Black Kettle</strong>’s village,<br /> though some in Denver City said<br /> we’re at war, which made it a battle,<br /> and some called Soule a damn traitor<br /> because he kept his men above the fray.<br /> Boylan has seen with his own eyes<br /> how death threats have turned up<br /> under Soule’s plate while he stepped<br /> out back for a piss. He eyes Soule now,<br /> sidelong. Sure seems all the verve’s<br /> been bled right out of him—a man<br /> that used to laugh at his own sly jokes,<br /> or wax philosophical over losing<br /> at cards.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; “It all evens out in the end,”<br /> he’d say, then wink: “Dust to dust,<br /> no matter you’re planted with a jingle<br /> in your pocket.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Of course, marriage<br /> sobered him up. The very prospect<br /> made him jump at the Colonel’s offer<br /> of a marshal’s star and steady pay.<br /> Then came the inquest, and fresh<br /> strikes by the <strong>Arapaho</strong> and <strong>Cheyenne</strong><br /> hot to avenge Chivington’s slaughter.<br /> And Soule, for his testimony, called<br /> by some an “Indian lover” like Tappan,<br /> the man Moonlight picked to head<br /> the investigation. <em>Small wonder<br /> some hate him,</em> Boylan thinks. Still,<br /> half the town feels damn appalled<br /> by what was done, and looks on Soule<br /> as a brave and honest man. Boylan<br /> contemplates the marshal’s contemplation.<br /> Why don’t he just <em>go on?</em> When Soule<br /> sits down for a meal, the place<br /> soon empties out—for who’d care<br /> to risk their health by sitting near<br /> so marked a man? Look at him. What<br /> could he be reading in that spindly foam<br /> scrawled across the pale gold surface<br /> of his beer?<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Now a stamping of boots<br /> brings some stranger in: battered valise<br /> and derby, green paisley vest. Soule<br /> doesn’t stir as the man picks out a table<br /> by the shrouded piano, swatting dust<br /> from his trousers before taking a chair.<br /> <em>This one’s either unafraid,</em> thinks Boylan,<br /> <em>or ignorant. Or both.</em> The new arrival<br /> spots him and barks, “A Mule Skinner,<br /> my good man.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Boylan runs a thumbnail<br /> across his whiskery chin, then drags<br /> himself over to his customer. “Friend,<br /> there’s tequila in back, but I’m fresh out<br /> of blackberry liquor.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The stranger’s<br /> brow wrinkles and he juts his jaw.<br /> “What’s <em>he</em> drinking?”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Boylan<br /> can almost feel the marshal stiffen.<br /> “Solomon Tascher,” he says.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;“Beer?”<br /> the gent wonders.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“So-called,”<br /> says Boylan.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The stranger shrugs.<br /> “Beans and bacon too, if you got it—<br /> and the bacon ain’t rancid.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Boylan<br /> grits his teeth. “That’ll be three dollars,<br /> friend. Gold only. Coin, or nuggets or dust<br /> weighed at the bar.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The man frowns,<br /> reaches inside his vest—and Boylan<br /> blanches. But the fellow merely<br /> brings forth a crooked black cheroot.<br /> He holds it up with a kind of reverence,<br /> like a golden nugget. “And a lucifer,<br /> my man, if you got one.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;“Sure thing,”<br /> Boylan says, thinking, <em>And I ain’t<br /> your man.</em> He turns then to find<br /> the marshal’s up at last and headed<br /> for the door.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; “Take care now, Silas,”<br /> he calls.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Without looking back,<br /> Soule calls, “G’day, John,” and steps<br /> out into the mild April sun.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Here now,”<br /> the gent says, a keenness in his voice.<br /> “Would he be Captain Silas Soule?<br /> Of Sand Creek?”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Boylan’s eyes narrow.<br /> “That’s Silas Soule of Denver City,<br /> Assistant Provost Marshal here.<br /> Who wants to know?”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; “Damn me,”<br /> the man says. “He’s what brought me<br /> here from Boston.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Boylan hides a grin.<br /> Had Soule heard that he’d crack, <em>Strange!<br /> I’d have thought you’d traveled here<br /> by stagecoach.</em><br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; “Boston,” Boylan says.<br /> His own home town.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Boston, yes.<br /> I write for <em>The Boston Journal</em>.”</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Do you, now?<br /> You must know Perley, then. I used to read<br /> his Washington letters over breakfast, before<br /> I lit out for the West.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Perley,” the man<br /> drawls. “Sure. Hell of a pen.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Boylan<br /> shrugs. “A good Whig,” he said, “then<br /> a good Republican. Like yourself,<br /> I guess.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The man flashes a white smile.<br /> “Sure,” he says. “Of course.”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“You’re a bit<br /> far from the Back Bay,” Boylan says.<br /> “Have you caught gold fever?”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Not at all,”<br /> the man laughs, then lowers his voice. “Y’see,<br /> I’m here to follow the Sand Creek inquiry,<br /> and interview the principals if I can.”<br /> He glances toward the window. Soule<br /> stands outside with his back to the glass<br /> like a man listening to distant thunder.<br /> “Think he’d talk to me?”<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This question<br /> gives Boylan pause. Before Sand Creek,<br /> before the inquest, Soule was the kind<br /> you couldn’t shut up. Now he smolders<br /> like a damped-down fire. “Can’t say,”<br /> Boylan answers at last. “He’s bound<br /> for his office down the street, I believe.<br /> I can’t swear he’ll be open to talk.<br /> Could be he’s talked enough.”</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>Marked Men </em>(Turning Point Books, 2013).</p> <h3>Tests of Faith</h3> <p><em>(four voices)</em></p> <p>1</p> <p>I slaughtered my first infidel,<br /> but only after showing him<br /> what mercy the Lord demands.<br /> <em>Go on,</em> I whispered. <em>Say goodbye<br /> to that wife of yours.</em> The man<br /> <br /> sobbed into the hooded eye<br /> of the camera, stammering love.<br /> Later: two hours of fervent prayer,<br /> five of celebration. My brothers’<br /> cheers broke like spring rain<br /> <br /> over my buzzing head, bathed<br /> my fevered face. I’d begged<br /> to be given a vision of heaven,<br /> and had my answer: the gash<br /> parting thick lips beneath<br /> <br /> the gliding blade, the shudder,<br /> the seizure of breathlessness,<br /> the sanctified release. My hand<br /> made rock by the strength of God.<br /> This righteous hand!</p> <p>2</p> <p>I strapped my first jihadi down,<br /> strapped down jaw and brow<br /> to make him gape, gagged him—<br /> then let the cold water pour. <em>Go on!</em><br /> I roared.<em> Tell us again how great<br /> <br /> Allah is!</em> Hanson circled, aimed<br /> the Handycam; the hajji thrashed,<br /> gasped, retched—how many times?<br /> I lost count. But, at last, he lapsed<br /> against the board, mother-naked,<br /> <br /> a void. <em>Fuck, </em>I said. But Hanson<br /> had a plan. We laid the guy on ice<br /> in a ration crate, pending the next<br /> trash run. Later: two hours toasting<br /> American ingenuity at the Baghdad<br /> <br /> Country Club, ’til Hanson’s head<br /> lolled to the table. I drank on,<br /> thanking Christ the Army drummed<br /> every weakness out of my heart.<br /> This well-trained heart!</p> <p>3</p> <p>I strangled my first poet<br /> in the mirror. The nightmare's<br /> pulsing alarm conjured up<br /> a thudding ’copter, the broad<br /> blade of its searchlight cleaving<br /> <br /> my tongue's hoof. <em>The most</em><br /> <em>horrible things, </em>says Linh Dinh,<br /> <em>become mere spectacles to the true</em><br /> <em>outsider.</em> Which side of my skin<br /> is best to write on? Will I turn<br /> <br /> into a tattoo addict, or a habitué<br /> of opium dens? <em>Read an American</em><br /> <em>account of the war, and you see</em><br /> <em>how excited the writer is. He is</em><br /> <em>almost gleeful.</em> Linh, don't tell me<br /> <br /> brutality’s the <em>lingua franca</em> now!<br /> I feel sick gutting a fish. Caught<br /> in the gunship’s shadow, I grieve<br /> hearing news about the divorce<br /> of Signifier and Signified.</p> <p>4</p> <p>I signed the executive order,<br /> and the mosque was crushed.<br /> I (another I) whispered a code,<br /> and weeks later yet another I<br /> climbed a shattered ladder<br /> <br /> made of bomb-vest fragments<br /> toward a hive full of virgins.<br /> I voted billions for the Pentagon<br /> in exchange for certain photos.<br /> In lieu of the news, I recited<br /> <br /> a teleprompter’s lies. I marched<br /> for peace, but no one could read<br /> my sign’s scribbled Aramaic.<br /> My brothers and I surrounded<br /> our whorish sister and broke her<br /> <br /> with stones. My taxes rained<br /> down like fire on the orphans.<br /> Sometimes I wake in the night<br /> and think, <em>The war is over.</em><br /> But another I remembers.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>Thread of the Real</em> (2012) and republished in <em>The World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).</p> <h3>The Blue</h3> <p>In memory of Michael Nigg,<br /> April 28, 1969 – September 8, 1995</p> <p>The dream refused me his face.<br /> There was only Mike, turned away;<br /> damp tendrils of hair curled out<br /> from under the ribbed, rolled<br /> brim of a knit ski cap. <em>He’s hiding</em></p> <p><em>the wound,</em> I thought, and my heart<br /> shrank. Then Mike began to talk—<br /> to <em>me,</em> it seemed, though gazing off<br /> at a distant, sunstruck stand of aspen<br /> that blazed against a ragged wall</p> <p>of pines. His voice flowed like sweet<br /> smoke, or amber Irish whiskey;<br /> or better: a brook littered with colors<br /> torn out of autumn. The syllables<br /> swept by on the surface of his voice—</p> <p>so many, so swift, I couldn’t catch<br /> their meanings … yet struggled not<br /> to interrupt, not to ask or plead—<br /> as though distress would be exactly<br /> the wrong emotion. Then a wind</p> <p>gusted into the aspen grove, turned<br /> its yellows to a blizzard of sparks.<br /> When the first breath of it touched us,<br /> Mike fell silent. Then he stood. I felt<br /> the dream letting go, and called,</p> <p>“Don’t!” Mike flung out his arms,<br /> shouted an answer … and each word<br /> shimmered like a hammered bell.<br /> (Too soon the dream would take back<br /> all but their resonance.) The wind</p> <p>surged. Then Mike leaned into it,<br /> slipped away like a wavering flame.<br /> And all at once I noticed the sky:<br /> its sheer, light-scoured immensity;<br /> the lavish tenderness of its blue.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>The Rain at Midnight</em> (2000) and republished in <em>The World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).</p> <h3>City Limits</h3> <p>For Melody</p> <p>You’re like wildwood at the edge of a city.<br /> And I’m the city: steam, sirens, a jumble<br /> of lit and unlit windows in the night.<br /> <br /> You’re the land as it must have been<br /> and will be—before me, after me.<br /> It’s your natural openness<br /> I want to enfold me. But then<br /> you’d become city; or you’d hide<br /> away your wildness to save it.<br /> <br /> So I stay within limits—city limits,<br /> heart limits. Although, under everything,<br /> I have felt unlimited Earth. Unlimited you.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>House of Mirrors</em> (1992) and republished in <em>The World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).</p> <h3>Comfort Food</h3> <p>Long Distance</p> <p>His mother knows<br /> who but not where<br /> he is. She warns<br /> into the phone, “Don’t<br /> rake leaves too long,<br /> you’ll hurt your back.”<br /> Out his window,<br /> leafless piney ridges,<br /> the farther ranges<br /> snowbound. “Don’t<br /> worry now,” he says.<br /> “I’ll be careful.”<br /> <br /> Next time she knows<br /> where but not who.<br /> “You never <em>listened</em>,”<br /> in a child’s voice.<br /> “It’s me,” he begins.<br /> She snaps: “You think<br /> I don’t <em>know</em> that?”<br /> And suddenly she’s<br /> chatting about the rain<br /> and fog out her window,<br /> there at the far other<br /> end of the line.</p> <p>*</p> <p><em>Breath</em></p> <p>The world enters<br /> us as breath. We<br /> <br /> return it to itself<br /> as breath. When<br /> <br /> we’re done with<br /> the world, where<br /> <br /> (he wonders) does<br /> all that breath go?</p> <p>*</p> <p>A Travelin’ Woman</p> <p>The last words his mother said to him<br /> were (as usual) long distance. Freed<br /> at last from the doctors’ clutches,<br /> <br /> delivered by wheelchair into the human<br /> tenderness of hospice, she exulted<br /> into the phone: “I’m a travelin’ woman!”<br /> <br /> “Where you headed?” he said, buoyed<br /> by her joy. “Where?” she laughed.<br /> “I don’t know. Timbuktu!”</p> <p>*</p> <p>Dream Image After<br /> the First Good Cry</p> <p>westwarding river—<br /> red-gold shreds of Sun scattered<br /> on it and in it</p> <p>*</p> <p>Open Casket</p> <p>She’s a stranger, though he has to agree<br /> <br /> they’ve done a beautiful job with her hair,<br /> and yes she looks peaceful, out of pain,<br /> <br /> and the silk blouse under the black sweater<br /> shines like the petals of a sun-struck lily,<br /> and the hands, one atop the other, look<br /> <br /> as if he’d held them. Knowing he doesn’t<br /> know this stranger, though, he turns away,<br /> <br /> eyes shut tight to remember his mother.</p> <p>*</p> <p>Going On</p> <p>They knew her breath would stop,<br /> as her husband’s breath had stopped.<br /> As people by the thousands every day<br /> stop, breathing the world back one<br /> <br /> last time into itself. Like all mourners,<br /> they felt the world itself should stop.<br /> But no. The world simply took her<br /> last breath back—then began to share<br /> <br /> it among them in the form of weeping.<br /> Like a sacred bread. This sorrow bread.<br /> Can this be the secret, then? The breath<br /> they all had shared with her so long<br /> <br /> still here, in the world—the world’s<br /> going-on keeping it in circulation?<br /> Small wonder they savor the ache of it:<br /> the unstopped breath of a mother’s love.</p> <p>*<br /> Rereading “Hear”</p> <p>—after Lorine Niedecker</p> <p><br /> Twenty-some years<br /> back he sounded out<br /> her transcription of<br /> mourning doves<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <em>You<br /> ah you</em><br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; her mother<br /> gone gravely still<br /> <br /> Only now has he<br /> come to hear those<br /> doves her way:<br /> <em>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; True<br /> too true </em><br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; he longs<br /> to say—<br /> <br /> To whom?</p> <p>*</p> <p>Comfort Food</p> <p>A fifty-something crying in the dairy aisle,<br /> lost in a dream of his dead mother. Grief<br /> welled up in him, “out of nowhere”<br /> (as they say), and now he’s a spectacle.<br /> <br /> At least his display turns out to be brief.<br /> <br /> He smiles abjectly a moment, “gathers<br /> his wits,” lets loose a broken sigh—<br /> then picks out the goods he came to buy.<br /> Butter. Cheese. The whole milk of childhood.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>Thread of the Real </em>(2012) and republished in <em>The World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).</p> <h3>Guanábana</h3> <p>Spanish translation by Patricia Herminia</p> <p>After hurricane Gilbert, this place<br /> was only shredded jungle. Now<br /> it's Jesús and Lídia's <em>casa</em>,<br /> <br /> built by him, by hand, weekends<br /> and vacations, the way my father<br /> built our first house. Years<br /> <br /> we've watched the house expand,<br /> two rooms to three, to four, to five.<br /> The yard, just a patch of gouged<br /> <br /> sand and shattered palmettos once,<br /> is covered now in trimmed grass,<br /> bordered by blushing frangipani<br /> <br /> and pepper plants—jalapeños,<br /> habaneros—and this slender tree<br /> Jesús planted three years back,<br /> <br /> a stick with tentative leaves then<br /> out of a Yuban coffee can, but now<br /> thirty feet high, its branches laden<br /> <br /> with <em>guanábana</em>—dark green<br /> pear-shaped fruit with spiky skin<br /> and snowy flesh, with seeds<br /> <br /> like obsidian tears. Jesús<br /> carves out a bite and offers it<br /> on the flat of his big knife's blade:<br /> <br /> the texture's melonish, the taste<br /> wild and sweet—like the lives<br /> we build after hurricanes.</p> <p>*</p> <p>Guanábana</p> <p>Spanish translation by Patricia Herminia</p> <p>Después del hurabán Gilbert, este lugar<br /> era nada más que una selva hecho trizas. Ahora<br /> es la casa de Jesús y Lídia,<br /> <br /> construído por él, a mano, fines de semana<br /> y vacaciones, como hizo mi padre cuando<br /> construyó nuestra primera casa. Hace años<br /> <br /> hemos mirado la casa ampliar,<br /> dos cuartos a tres, a cuatro, a cinco.<br /> El patio, antes nada más que un trozo<br /> <br /> de arena excavada y palmitos destrozados,<br /> ahora está cubierto de hierba recortada,<br /> bordeada por franchipanieros ruborizantes<br /> <br /> y plantas de pimienta—jalapeños,<br /> habaneros—y un tal árbol delgado<br /> que Jesús plantó hace tres años atrás,<br /> <br /> por aquel entonces un palo con hojas titubiantes<br /> sacado de una lata de café Yuban, pero ahora<br /> treinta metros de altura, sus ramas repletas<br /> <br /> de guanábana—una fruta verde oscuro<br /> con forma de pera, piel de espinas<br /> y carne nevosa, con semillas<br /> <br /> como lágrimas obsidianas. Jesús<br /> corta un bocado y lo ofrece<br /> en la hoja de su cuchillo grande:<br /> <br /> la textura es de melón, el sabor<br /> silvestre y dulce—como las vidas<br /> que construímos después de los huracanes.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>English original first published in <em>The Earth-Boat </em>(2012), reprinted in<em> World As Is: New &amp; Selected Poems, 1972-2015</em> (New York Quarterly Books, 2016), and republished with Patricia Herminia’s Spanish translation in <em>Eyes of the </em>Cuervo / <em>Ojos del </em>Crow (Harmony Hill Books, 2018).</p> <h3>Chopped Earth Under Curdled Clouds</h3> <p>(A landscape picture)</p> <p>As El Greco might have done it,<br /> although that crevice of dry creek’s<br /> no Tagus River, the slouching wreck<br /> of abandoned farmhouse no Toledo.<br /> Still, as this flood of fraught light<br /> draws me to a stop just off the road<br /> to grab notebook and pen, so it might<br /> <br /> have made the artist seize his brush,<br /> reflect, transform, imbue, express—<br /> before the scene’s charged figurations<br /> crumbled into opaque particulars.<br /> Sure enough, by the time I look up<br /> from the page, the crumbling’s begun.<br /> The depth of field’s shallowed, and now<br /> <br /> each high-embossed clod and furrow<br /> flattens, and the clouds seem to sink,<br /> dissolving into this slow flow of mist.<br /> Soon the sun’s a faint-hearted blur,<br /> the house ghosted, the creek erased.<br /> No castle walls here, no cathedral spire,<br /> to hold the heavens and Earth in place.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 by Joseph Hutchison</p> <p>First published in <em>Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Annual </em>(2017).</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * 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x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> Wed, 12 Dec 2018 20:31:08 +0000 yongli 2982 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Juliana Aragón Fatula http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/juliana-aragon-fatula <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Juliana Aragón Fatula</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 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'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2018-12-11T16:03:14-07:00" title="Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - 16:03" class="datetime">Tue, 12/11/2018 - 16:03</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/juliana-aragon-fatula" data-a2a-title="Juliana Aragón Fatula"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fjuliana-aragon-fatula&amp;title=Juliana%20Arag%C3%B3n%20Fatula"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Juliana Aragón Fatula" src="/sites/default/files/Juliana_Fatula.jpg" style="width: 509px; height: 509px;" /></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Juliana Aragón Fatula, a southern Colorado native and a member of the Sandra Cisneros’ Macondo Foundation, won the High Plains Book Festival Poetry Award 2016 for her second book, <em>Red Canyon Falling on Churches</em>. Her first book, <em>Crazy Chicana in Catholic City</em>, published by Conundrum Press, has been used in creative writing classes in several universities. She believes in the power of education to change lives.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Poems</h2>&#13; &#13; <h3>Cell Windows</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Dark empty eyes. Alone, Ángel tries not to sleep at night.<br />&#13; Ángel kills me, “Do you have any tats? No…any brands?<br />&#13; His arm laced, branded, scarred.<br />&#13; “Done so many things wrong… you can’t shock me,” I whisper in his ear.<br />&#13; He leans near my face. “You don’t mean anything, to me.”<br />&#13; I close my eyes, mouth in silence. “I know you.”<br />&#13; Late at night, I turn the pages, read his essay “I hate men! I love women.” I give him an A-.  <br />&#13; I turn off the light, watch mi esposo’s chest heave and fall.<br />&#13; I pray for Ángel; pray for temicxoch, the flowery dream, for all the angels.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Estrellas</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Estrellas fall up toward morning,<br />&#13; scented of jasmine June.<br />&#13; Tang of time comes into bud,<br />&#13; soft stone glistens,<br />&#13; blue-black hatchling cries,<br />&#13; calling the night.<br />&#13; Listen.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Frida</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>God cast perfect light,<br />&#13; oozed violence high in the tree top.<br />&#13; En casa azul,<br />&#13; Frida captured hews of mist,<br />&#13; web of pain,<br />&#13; harsh beauty of ruin,<br />&#13; Zen of calla lilly​<br />&#13; and violet.<br />&#13; Resentful,<br />&#13; the copper nightingale<br />&#13; refused to sing.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Hanging from the Hood</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>father holding onto a lantern hanging from the hood<br />&#13; of a Model T Ford, twenty miles per hour<br />&#13; on the dirt road from New México to Colorado<br />&#13; in the dark summer night stars bouncing up above<br />&#13; no moon to light the way praying for land, water, sun<br />&#13; leaving grandfather with his herd of sheep<br />&#13; grandmother with her garden<br />&#13; father searching for generosity,<br />&#13; hoping for prosperity<br />&#13; longing for equality<br />&#13; finding only<br />&#13; stars bouncing up above.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>You Just Had to Be an Indian, Didn’t You?</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Mom’s long Medusa braids like twisted fingers<br />&#13; pointing to the stars—<br />&#13; they’re top heavy as an ancient moon.<br />&#13; She’s real, like a drag queen’s décor,<br />&#13; it hurts. She’s southwest<br />&#13; like Santa Fe cacti, easy like an orchid<br />&#13; but we wear gloves cuz’ she’s sharp as a razor.<br />&#13; When she drums at powwow, it’s like a bomb<br />&#13; dropped on your head—<br />&#13; her love long. It’s great-giant Indian love.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Holy Bones</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>starless blue-black night,<br />&#13; la muerte dances on the grave.<br />&#13; not like the funky chicken dance,<br />&#13; more like the conga.<br />&#13; hips sway, the earth shakes,<br />&#13; the dance of the dead<br />&#13; down down down.<br />&#13; the bones <em>bang da da bang da da bang</em>.<br />&#13; el viento breezes through tired ribs.<br />&#13; more funny than scary.<br />&#13; muertos, juntos raíces,<br />&#13; get along when they’re dead,<br />&#13; porque, las calaveras​<br />&#13; are all the same color—bone.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Poema for Sandra Cisneros</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Whenever I can’t sleep, I pretend I’m in the house on Mango Street, casa azul. You’re there in the kitchen sloshing a drink all over your slippers. You wink and the corner of your mouth rides up like, ‘waz up?’ If you lived in my hometown, you’d have coffee on the back porch with me and we’d share secrets. I’d pop in sometimes to your house on Banana Street and we’d try on each other’s clothes. You are the sister I never got because my parents were too busy having babies in Colorado and you were born in Chicago. You can’t sleep tonight either. You are probably in your big fat chair sipping coffee and thinking about the poem I wrote for you. The coffee tastes like whipped cream with a splash of cinnamon. It takes on the flavor of the mountains and waterfalls, down smooth.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>If you lived here we’d meet at the river-walk and ride our fat tire bikes up and down in the dark. That damn moon is so full it over flows and we could put our mouths underneath and catch some moon juice. It’s quiet there at night except for the occasional <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/mountain-lion"><strong>mountain lion</strong></a> and <strong>black bear</strong>, but they mind their own business. We could stop, sit on the park bench and watch the night flow down to <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/pueblo"><strong>Pueblo</strong></a>. I’d tell you about the time I read your book and cried because I never knew there was an Esperanza in me. I’d ask you why women aren’t supposed to be loose, drink alone, puff on cigars and cuss. You’d laugh and say, <em>this is just a dream, wake up</em>.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Tenochtitlan</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>blue-raven hair,<br />&#13; draped in wicked darkness,<br />&#13; her face absent lips or eyes,<br />&#13; she feels her way—<br />&#13; the wind carries la bruja​<br />&#13; in the river mist.<br />&#13; she searches in torment for her niños,<br />&#13; but they were lost<br />&#13; five hundred years ago<br />&#13; in Tenochtitlan.<br />&#13; the river witch grieves their watery grave;<br />&#13; wails for children<br />&#13; to replace the ones she drowned—<br />&#13; she floats like fog, vanishes,<br />&#13; dragged into the thin dim dawn.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3><strong>Coyolx</strong>a<strong>uhqui</strong><strong> and the Star Gods</strong></h3>&#13; &#13; <p style="margin-left:1.0in;"><em>Coyolxauhqui, feeling disgraced by her mother’s immaculate conception, created a plot with the four hundred centzón huitznahuas to destroy her brother, Huitzilopochtli, while he was still in the womb.</em></p>&#13; &#13; <p style="margin-left:3.0in;">—Náhuatl Myth</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The night was mine; centzón huitznahuas​<br />&#13; shined just for me. Mother, earth goddess—<br />&#13; Father, sun god. Azteca princess,<br />&#13; they bowed when I entered.<br />&#13; Tonantzin betrayed us all. Tricked and seduced<br />&#13; by the god of immaculate conception,<br />&#13; her flaming feather ball of lust.<br />&#13; Brought forth the god of war;<br />&#13; his armor turquoise and emerald.<br />&#13; My brothers and sisters shamed by mother,<br />&#13; drew their obsidian knives, baby in her womb.<br />&#13; Dug our own grave with disgust, condemned, transformed<br />&#13; into the moon and stars in the glittering world,<br />&#13; waiting for the new sun.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Stonehenge — 2007</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>She hands me the dowser.<br />&#13; my hands—stones,<br />&#13; jagged blades,<br />&#13; monsters,<br />&#13; buried,<br />&#13; loose,<br />&#13; loaded-down.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Eyes etched<br />&#13; in treasures,<br />&#13; sea caves,<br />&#13; ancestral graves of jade.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2018 Juliana Aragón Fatula</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 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class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/latino" hreflang="en">latino</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/latina" hreflang="en">latina</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> Tue, 11 Dec 2018 23:03:14 +0000 yongli 2981 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Michael Henry http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/michael-henry <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Michael Henry </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2018-12-11T14:20:24-07:00" title="Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - 14:20" class="datetime">Tue, 12/11/2018 - 14:20</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/michael-henry" data-a2a-title="Michael Henry "><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fmichael-henry&amp;title=Michael%20Henry%20"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img alt="Poet: Michael Henry" src="/sites/default/files/Michael_Henry.jpg" style="width: 300px; height: 370px;" /></p> <p>Michael Henry is co-founder and Executive Director of Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the largest independent literary arts center in the Rocky Mountain west. He is the author of three books of poetry and has received fellowships from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Platte Forum. He was recently awarded a Livingston Fellowship from the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. He lives in Thornton, Colorado, with his wife and two daughters.</p> <h2>Poems</h2> <h3>Prayers</h3> <p>Each prayer you whisper is a small bird<br /> rising up, alighting on a branch in the tree<br /> of desire, twisted gray arms, flashing leaves.</p> <p>These birds will not enter heaven,<br /> will not lose themselves in bright clouds, or run<br /> into picture windows. They hover</p> <p>and settle in the ivy wall along<br /> the garden, their small voices ringing bells,<br /> their flitting nerves unseen.</p> <p>You know their closeness each day,<br /> wingbrush against your cheek when raking<br /> the leaves, a shock of breath. At dawn</p> <p>they wake you, their conversations<br /> a chatter of words without punctuation<br /> or denouement. When you gave them up—</p> <p>on your knees, in flannel pajamas,<br /> your hands pressed together, smooth<br /> candle-flame of fingers¾you believed</p> <p>they would come to rest in God’s ear<br /> and make your life something else<br /> than what it is. But you know, <em>you know</em>:</p> <p>they are just gray-brown finches, with hearts<br /> like ours, searching for seed, building<br /> downy nests in the eaves of the house.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Michael Henry</p> <h3>August, Public Pool</h3> <p>Children swarm under the tower. A hammer<br /> ticks on steel high above, where a massive bucket tilts.<br /> Farther, farther. Almost there.&nbsp; By the false blue<br /> shoreline, three teenage girls bronze their backs.<br /> Boys walk past, flexed and puffed, swallow hard,<br /> lick dry lips. Everything is tease and<br /> anticipation. My little girls are in the mass, waiting.<br /> A bell finally gongs, the bucket tips and spills<br /> chlorinated molten silver on the masses. There are<br /> screams and shouts, and then, it’s done, for now.<br /> A lanky boy cannonballs into the deep end.<br /> A mother floats on a tube, eyes closed,<br /> twin ponytailed daughters ferrying her along the lazy<br /> river. If I were more—more <em>something</em>—I might<br /> grab my wallet, go buy a popsicle or<br /> Cherry Coke. Sweetness burning my throat, ease all<br /> around, the sun going down gold and intimate.<br /> But I’ve had my life of wanting and sometimes getting,<br /> and even though part of me wants to never leave,<br /> the pretty-boy lifeguards have already begun<br /> to stack chairs. Closing time. My girls scurry up<br /> blue-lipped and shivering. They want<br /> chocolate cones at Dairy Queen and I won’t say no.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Michael Henry</p> <h3>To Sylvia Plath</h3> <p>In my head a voice recites your lines.<br /> Your blacks cackle and drag and interrupt<br /> the joy of the swing band music,</p> <p>alas, their brass can never last. Too full, too rich,<br /> it carries me to tears, fleeting yet shameless.<br /> The band is crowded into the gazebo,</p> <p>the sun gold and dying, pure heat.<br /> Off in the distance, two men push a cart, gab<br /> in Spanish. From them a boy buys</p> <p>a can of lemonade. In the distance,<br /> a blue fountain shimmers in the center<br /> of the brown lake. August is here in full</p> <p>and I am getting used to this sort of thing.<br /> Your summer bees have drowsed and are<br /> lazy, their compass shot. Everyone</p> <p>I love is either buried, or far away.<br /> Your old colossus remains<br /> on the hill, and never will get put right.</p> <p>Like you, I am morbidly cloaked. Like always.<br /> Lemonade and sweet music<br /> force a momentary stay, little more.</p> <p>This morning I read “Edge” I read “Balloons.”<br /> I saw you with those people and the bees,<br /> your thumb with the bloody cut.</p> <p>I don’t expect a miracle, or accident.<br /> Far away from here, someone is<br /> leaving a pebble on your stone.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Michael Henry</p> <h3>Poem Beginning with Lines from Bob Dylan</h3> <p>In the room the heat pipes just cough<br /> and the country music station plays soft,<br /> and I cannot find the switch to turn it off,<br /> so when the film projector jams<br /> I am too late. That sad burn-and-peel<br /> of the home movie lives I once knew—<br /> my first two-wheeled bike ride,<br /> my sisters and I leaping into a pool,<br /> or, before my time, Mom and Dad’s<br /> after-wedding dash to a green car<br /> tailed with stringed cans,<br /> all in a faded Kodachrome field.<br /> The celluloid has bubbled and smoked<br /> away and broke, leaving me<br /> to wander white blaze with whirring fan.<br /> How strange as each dawn the sky<br /> turns blue and I’m reminded of the dead<br /> cold mornings when I used to pray<br /> for the earth to let me go.<br /> Now I pray I will have all the time<br /> I’ll need, before I’m found again<br /> in the tiny wood-paneled rooms<br /> of the old house on McKinley Parkway<br /> as those old pipes cough and clank,<br /> where country music plays soft, twangy<br /> and sweet on an old radio somewhere,<br /> and when my mother brings me<br /> some tea my grandmother<br /> will stand in the doorway and ask<br /> if I am hungry, do I want something to eat,<br /> while there in the living room,<br /> where the TV is forever on,<br /> in the light cast by a reading lamp<br /> my grandfather makes<br /> his way through a newspaper<br /> without a date on it.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Michael Henry</p> <h3>Tomatoes</h3> <p><em>After Stephen Dobyns</em></p> <p>I’m on a parapet looking down<br /> at upturned faces and voices<br /> rising like feathers in an<br /> updraft. I am afraid of heights but know<br /> I will fall, and in the knowing my fear<br /> is singed, my will is a skeleton bound<br /> by silver twine, on my cold wrists<br /> there are bracelets, inlaid turquoise with silver<br /> hammered thin by a Hopi in Arizona,<br /> a boy whose face is wide and soft, who blinks<br /> each time the small hammer strikes.<br /> I once had a girl, once lived in the gray<br /> cosmos of her cigarette smoke, her<br /> dark-paneled room, her gold-brown eyes<br /> and face so finely wrought,<br /> like porcelain. The way she brushed<br /> her hair down across<br /> her scapula and vertebrae left me<br /> weak, I thought I might turn<br /> to a feather and drift away.<br /> She had a friend whose name was Paige<br /> who had a mother who did away<br /> with herself on the summer solstice,<br /> four bottles of pills while sitting<br /> in a chaise lounge by a thicket of<br /> tomato vines overgrown and unkempt,<br /> the red planets so full and heavy,<br /> and Paige said every day<br /> that August she ate them<br /> with a pinch of salt,<br /> she said they tasted<br /> like nothing, nothing at all,<br /> like air, she said.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Michael Henry</p> <h3>Lemonade</h3> <p>In the small kitchen<br /> on the white table<br /> lies a single<br /> lemon. I am riding<br /> a bicycle<br /> on the stairs<br /> coming down,<br /> bumpity bump,<br /> but the cycle<br /> grows small<br /> and then<br /> it’s a pretzel<br /> between my knees.<br /> Nothing is ever easy.<br /> I am thirsty.<br /> I go to the lemon<br /> and screw it open.<br /> It has<br /> a plastic cap.<br /> I drink<br /> and drink.<br /> Cold, sweet, and tart.<br /> I will never quench<br /> this thirst.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Michael Henry</p> <h3>October Travels, Wind River Range</h3> <p><em>For Bill Henderson</em></p> <p>Last night, in our nylon tents,<br /> we were tempted by the wolves again,<br /> their howls curling around<br /> our camp. This morning I knew<br /> our trip was over.<br /> We slouched along the valley<br /> toward our cars, in our heads<br /> some eternal progress we’d amassed<br /> in the cold nights. We were like ravens,<br /> picking at traces in the dust and leaves,<br /> a different language left behind, straggling<br /> forms in a fog, now barely on the ridge.<br /> We learned this and walked.<br /> The wolves were silent.<br /> Then to the west, a thin slot<br /> appeared, a pale blue swath, then gold light<br /> illuminating, our bodies walking<br /> away from the wolves.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Michael Henry</p> <h3>Blue Haze, Goodnight Moon</h3> <p>Black smoke courses along the blank hills,<br /> there is a crack that runs the length of it.<br /> Shouts in far-off dusk, I park. The engine ticks.<br /> Early night heat, late September. Soon the leaves<br /> will collapse their canopies, like so many<br /> umbrellas. Then the summer of fire<br /> will no longer burn my lungs<br /> or clot my eyes, those plumes<br /> stretching from the west.<br /> Upstairs, the kids are asleep, white noise<br /> the shape of a running fan, night light burning<br /> their room gold from within,<br /> a glistening cocoon.<br /> Ten o’clock. I tip-toe in, listen to their sleep,<br /> gaze at their shadow features.<br /> It is like drinking cold water from a well.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Michael Henry</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/language-arts" hreflang="en">Language Arts</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/writing" hreflang="en">Writing</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/thornton" hreflang="en">Thornton</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/wildlife" hreflang="en">wildlife</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sociology" hreflang="en">Sociology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/literature" hreflang="en">Literature</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/psychology" hreflang="en">Psychology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/music" hreflang="en">Music</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/environmental-science" hreflang="en">Environmental Science</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> Tue, 11 Dec 2018 21:20:24 +0000 yongli 2980 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Robert Cooperman http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/robert-cooperman <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Robert Cooperman</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/greg-vogl" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2018-09-26T08:24:41-06:00" title="Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - 08:24" class="datetime">Wed, 09/26/2018 - 08:24</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/robert-cooperman" data-a2a-title="Robert Cooperman"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Frobert-cooperman&amp;title=Robert%20Cooperman"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img alt="Robert Cooperman" src="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/sites/default/files/Robert_Cooperman_2.jpg" /></p> <p>Robert&nbsp;Cooperman&nbsp;is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently,&nbsp;<em>City Hat Frame Factory</em>.&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains</em>&nbsp;won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry.</p> <h2>Poems</h2> <h3>At the Denver Botanical Gardens</h3> <p>Beth and I have come early<br /> to view the on-loan Calders:<br /> whimsical bolted metal shapes<br /> reminiscent of Picasso’s flute playing<br /> goat-men and opulently endowed women,<br /> though these are more abstract,<br /> giant mobiles floating above babies’ cribs.</p> <p>It’s a treasure hunt to find the pieces,<br /> both of us racing to point, “Aha!”<br /> when we spot a black or blue or rust-<br /> colored mobile and stabile: a word,<br /> we read in the pamphlet, that means<br /> the pieces don’t move in the wind.</p> <p>Nothing seems to be moving this calm<br /> spring morning, except Beth and me<br /> as we stroll the grounds, admiring the artwork<br /> and the plants beautiful as sculptings,<br /> especially the hardy, prickly ones<br /> that had to adapt to a harsh, dry climate,<br /> like our favorites, the Spanish Bayonets:<br /> cellulose swords that home-owners plant<br /> under their otherwise easily burgled<br /> first-floor windows, the tips sharp<br /> as D’Artagnan’s or Zorro’s sabers.</p> <p>But here, they’re works of, if not art,<br /> then natural selection’s whittling<br /> and honing, to create the perfect shape<br /> for the perfect weapon.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>Slant</em> magazine</p> <h3>Stopping by Woods on Guanella Pass, Above Georgetown, Colorado</h3> <p>We drove from Denver for the changing leaves—<br /> the <strong>aspens</strong> turning gold and pumpkin-wild—<br /> and stopped to take photos among the trees.</p> <p>And since the drive had been long, we relieved<br /> ourselves off the trail; then we saw the sign<br /> among the vividly dying autumn leaves:</p> <p>“Attention!&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="/article/mountain-lion"><strong>Mountain lions</strong></a> have been seen<br /> in this area.”&nbsp; And is that a pile<br /> of steaming scat beneath the lovely trees?</p> <p>We did our business fast as rain off eaves.<br /> and didn’t dare linger even a while<br /> among the gorgeous, flaming, golden leaves,</p> <p>but convinced ourselves something big was breath-​<br /> ing, scenting meat all down our freezing spines,<br /> stalking us in the blazing autumn trees.</p> <p>Secure in our car, we looked back, reprieved,<br /> almost hoping to see a shadow climb<br /> down, tawny in the gorgeous, golden leaves,<br /> a predator’s easy gait among the trees.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>Loch Raven Review</em></p> <h3>On the Corner</h3> <p>“Iraq War Vets, anything helps,”<br /> his sign reads; she sits, leaning<br /> against a pole, their belongings<br /> in knapsacks in front of her.</p> <p>He wears a smile ill-fitting<br /> as a thrift shop jacket;<br /> her head droops in dejection,<br /> her cigarette ash growing longer.</p> <p>They look like weary travelers<br /> in a strange city: no place to stay<br /> except maybe a park tonight,<br /> or a downtown shelter.</p> <p>Beth rolls down her window—<br /> heat a traffic cop’s raised palm—<br /> and hands him a bill; he blesses her.</p> <p>Beth sighs, and I think that guy<br /> could be me, though I never served;<br /> Beth rolls up her window,<br /> the air-conditioning scouring us.</p> <p>In our rearview mirror, he holds<br /> their sign like a cue card;<br /> her knees are jackknifed<br /> into her chest, her exhaustion<br /> in pitiless America immense<br /> as the Rockies west of Denver.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>Exit 13 Magazine</em></p> <h3>Warning at the Bank</h3> <p>by Robert Cooperman</p> <p>The sign at our local bank warned<br /> no one would be allowed in<br /> wearing shades and a baseball cap:<br /> apparently, bank robbers’ preferred attire.</p> <p>One guy pulled off a series of heists<br /> in a single day, maybe trying for the world,<br /> or at least the state, record, or his habit<br /> so desperate, his hauls barely kept pace<br /> with the drugs he shot, snorted, or smoked.</p> <p>But the last time I needed money,<br /> I noticed, no sign: maybe the manager<br /> complacent after a year of boring business<br /> without interruptions, or maybe no one<br /> paid attention, so the manager gave up.</p> <p>The tellers are all women, and though<br /> they may be undercover agents packing<br /> more concealed heat than Old West gamblers<br /> with hideout guns, and more expert<br /> at martial arts than Bruce Lee, I fear<br /> for them in their lovely friendliness,</p> <p>always asking about my weekend plans,<br /> showing off engagement rings,<br /> or flirting with me, their safe uncle.</p> <p>They’re trained to hand over the money<br /> and keep smiling, though guns have gone off<br /> from the trigger fingers of nervous men<br /> who never thought they’d be reduced<br /> to doing this to get by.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <h3>Taking Beth to the Denver Nuggets Game Against<br /> the World Champion Golden State Warriors</h3> <p>Over breakfast at our favorite greasy spoon<br /> the next morning, Beth informs me I missed the action,<br /> by paying too much attention to Steph Curry<br /> sinking treys like dropping sugar cubes into coffee,</p> <p>and dribbling through the Nuggets defense<br /> with the speed of a husky with a bowlful of Purina.<br /> The real game, Beth leans closer, to make sure<br /> the scandal doesn’t leak out, was when the wife</p> <p>and small daughter of the guy in front of us<br /> went to the restroom, and his wife’s friend<br /> moved next to him, the woman, according to Beth,<br /> gorgeous, her skin like hot caramel, and abundant</p> <p>under the halter top she wore in this fall cold snap,<br /> her stylus-sculpted fingers caressing his face,<br /> tattooed, rope-hard arms, and belly, then a quick kiss<br /> from pillow-lips, before she returned to her own seat,</p> <p>the guy staring as if Adam’s last glimpse of Eden.<br /> “See what you missed,” Beth taunts now, as I slice<br /> into my French toast, and swish it through syrup.<br /> “Besides, the Nuggets lost again, not even close.”</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>Waterways</em></p> <h3>Rock Climbers at Garden of the Gods, Colorado</h3> <p>“I love work,” the old joke goes,<br /> can watch guys do it for hours.”</p> <p>No joke, I love to watch rock climbers,<br /> their slow, steady patience of ibexes<br /> that would drive most guys nuts,<br /> who jones on the speed of basketball,<br /> soccer, football, or hockey.</p> <p>It’s the climbers’ competence,<br /> the challenge of figuring out<br /> where to secure a piton,<br /> what fissure to grab hold of,<br /> where to plant their climbing shoes,<br /> or like that world-class Frenchwoman,<br /> ascending barefoot, her toes more agile<br /> than the hands of great tennis players.</p> <p>Then there was the time Beth and I<br /> were walking in The Garden of the Gods,<br /> once a <a href="/search/google/ute"><strong>Ute</strong></a> holy place, now a state park,<br /> its sandstone formations irresistible<br /> as Swiss chocolate to rock climbers.</p> <p>While our necks were craned—hungry<br /> as owlets for the regurgitated meat—<br /> one climber fell, his rope bracing him,<br /> thank goodness, and not the splattered mess<br /> below that we feared, turned away from,<br /> while other observers screamed,<br /> and someone ran for a park ranger,</p> <p>before the climber spidered back<br /> to the wall and signaled, to cheers,<br /> he was ready to continue, though Beth and I<br /> had had enough for one day.&nbsp;</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>Aethlon</em> magazine</p> <h3>The Kid with the Camera</h3> <p>Crossing the street<br /> with his elementary school class<br /> after a visit to the Botanical Gardens,<br /> he snaps at everything with the confidence<br /> of a smart, loved child: the street signs,<br /> the parking garage tunnel, and me,<br /> waiting for the light to change.</p> <p>It hits me like a giant salami<br /> in a vaudeville slapstick routine,<br /> this could be the opening scene<br /> of a mystery: the kid taking a photo<br /> of something, someone that should’ve remained,<br /> for the sake of his health, invisible.</p> <p>The bad guys track him down, rip the film<br /> from the camera, or smash it to pieces,<br /> and if the kid protests, I don’t even want<br /> to think what they’ll do to him.</p> <p>But maybe if they take him prisoner,<br /> the diminutive genius will make their lives hell.&nbsp;<br /> Or if it isn’t played for laughs, something<br /> terrible will be done to him, unless the cops&nbsp;<br /> or an intrepid rescuer frees him<br /> and wreaks terrible vengeance.</p> <p>All this flies through my head<br /> while the kid snaps me again and smiles<br /> that knowing smile that asserts<br /> the world belongs to him; and it does.</p> <p>Me?&nbsp; I’m almost finished with the space<br /> and oxygen he’ll need for the rest<br /> of his wonderful life, until—and he doesn’t<br /> know this yet—it’s his turn.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>Plainsongs</em> magazine</p> <h3>Mobbing the Hawk</h3> <p>“Mobbing,” it’s called, when crows<br /> attack a raptor in a tree or in flight.</p> <p>They scream off-key, as only crows can,<br /> to chase off the predator: blood memory</p> <p>strong as carrion scent, to recall their young<br /> or mates taken, bones clattering down.&nbsp;</p> <p>In the park this glorious Sunday morning,<br /> I spot a red-tail hawk in a tree, trying</p> <p>to make itself invisible from the murder<br /> of crows that would love to kill this beauty,</p> <p>its feathers marbled like opulent Renaissance<br /> tables treaties were signed on.&nbsp; But no peace</p> <p>treaty will be offered this morning,<br /> between raptor and outraged crows</p> <p>that keep up their racket until the great bird&nbsp;<br /> flaps its wings once and flies across the lake,</p> <p>crows giving chase, screaming, shrieking,<br /> making sure it won’t return, as much as we,</p> <p>earthbound humans, would love to see it<br /> snatch and silence an obstreperous crow,</p> <p>not nearly as lovely as this hawk;<br /> thus, in our murderous-aesthete eyes,</p> <p>undeserving of our worship.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>US. 1 Worksheets</em> magazine</p> <h3>“Learn English Here”<br /> Sign outside the Coram Deo Reform Church--Denver</h3> <p>“Learn English here,” the sign encourages,<br /> in all good will: Denver a city lyrical<br /> with Spanish, Vietnamese, a splattering—<br /> as if a brief spring sun shower—of French<br /> at one croissant bakery, on Saturdays,<br /> a smattering of Russian, Hebrew, Arabic.</p> <p>Still, English is necessary: to ask directions,<br /> to read cereal boxes, street signs, addresses,<br /> to fill out forms, and to avoid the thousand<br /> little mousetraps in this all-American city.</p> <p>But the sign’s in English, and presumes<br /> a non-native speaker will understand,<br /> and therefore not even need the lessons,</p> <p>though in this case, “English” could mean,<br /> “Only English spoken here,” “Or Speak<br /> English or Go Home,” if one assumes—<br /> and why not, without the proper words<br /> to deny the assertion—that whoever hung<br /> the sign bears no love for foreigners,<br /> and assumes all of them are illegal aliens.</p> <p>How hard would it have been to print,<br /> “Aprenda Ingles Aqui”? since someone<br /> in the church is going to teach English,<br /> and someone who wants to learn<br /> our most irregular tongue will thus<br /> know to walk inside, eager to sign up.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>The Chiron Review</em></p> <h3>Tailgating</h3> <p>The driver of the torpedo-sleek<br /> sports car behind me has clamped down<br /> on my rear fender so tight<br /> I can see rage bristling his face<br /> like a wounded boar: not caring<br /> I’m five miles over the speed limit.&nbsp;</p> <p>He’s waving a fist, punching the horn<br /> like a cattle prod: a semi blocks his path,<br /> or he’d have passed me blocks ago.</p> <p>When I turn into the parking lot<br /> of a department store, he follows, still<br /> so close he could suck fumes from my tailpipe,<br /> and, I hope, asphyxiate behind the wheel.</p> <p>But instead of the raging, muscle-crazed<br /> steroid tiger I expected to have to run from,<br /> he’s metamorphosed into an old man,<br /> arms stringy as deflated birthday balloons.</p> <p>“Why can’t you move your ass, damnit!”<br /> he rasps, and I fear he’ll swing so hard<br /> the wind from his haymaker will knock<br /> him down, and he’ll stroke out on the asphalt.</p> <p>The young impatient?&nbsp; It’s their grandfathers:<br /> so many places to go, things still to see,<br /> and so very, very little time.&nbsp;</p> <p>Copyright 2018 Robert Cooperman</p> <p>First published in <em>South Carolina Review</em></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/science" hreflang="en">science</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/biology" hreflang="en">Biology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/art" hreflang="en">Art</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sculpture" hreflang="en">Sculpture</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/denver" hreflang="en">Denver</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/mountain-lion" hreflang="en">mountain lion</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/homeless" hreflang="en">homeless</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/bank" hreflang="en">bank</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/denver-nuggets" hreflang="en">denver nuggets</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/basketball" hreflang="en">basketball</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/garden-gods" hreflang="en">Garden of the Gods</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/geography" hreflang="en">Geography</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/environment" hreflang="en">environment</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/psychology" hreflang="en">Psychology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/denver-botanical-gardens" hreflang="en">Denver Botanical Gardens</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/environmental-science" hreflang="en">Environmental Science</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/civicspolitics" hreflang="en">Civics/Politics</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sociology" hreflang="en">Sociology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/immigrants" hreflang="en">immigrants</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/immigration" hreflang="en">immigration</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p><a href="https://coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/cooperman_robert/">Colorado Poets Center: Robert Cooperman</a></p> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Wed, 26 Sep 2018 14:24:41 +0000 admin 2963 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Peter Anderson http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/peter-anderson <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Peter Anderson</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/greg-vogl" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2018-09-25T16:28:00-06:00" title="Tuesday, September 25, 2018 - 16:28" class="datetime">Tue, 09/25/2018 - 16:28</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/peter-anderson" data-a2a-title="Peter Anderson"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fpeter-anderson&amp;title=Peter%20Anderson"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img alt="Poet: Peter Anderson" src="/sites/default/files/Peter_Anderson.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 450px;" /></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Peter Anderson’s most recent books include <em>Heading Home: Field Notes </em>(Conundrum Press, 2017), a collection of flash prose and prose poems exploring rural life and the modern day eccentricities of the American West; <em>Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon</em> (Lithic Press, 2015), an anthology of Grand Canyon poems edited with Rick Kempa, which was nominated for a Colorado Book Award; and <em>First Church of the Higher Elevations</em> (Conundrum Press, 2015), a collection of essays on wildness, mountain places, and the life of the spirit. Peter taught writing at Adams State University for ten years. He lives in Crestone, Colorado.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Poems</h2>&#13; &#13; <h3>Black Ice</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>This mountain lake lives in shadow. The sun is a rounder… stays away longer each night, lays low behind the ridge during the day. The winds come down off the mountain, sweeping skiffs of snow across the ice. A father pulls on his skates, so much easier now with plastic and Velcro than it once was with leather and lace. He tests the freeze, first around the edges—a few feet thick—then out in the middle—clear and so deep, he can’t tell where the ice leaves off and the black water begins. He skates as fast as he can, grateful this sprint is his own—no whistles, no coach. He slides one blade in front of the other, leans into a wide rink turn, and carves two thin white lines that follow him out to the edge of the lake where his daughter, still wobbly in her new pink skates, glides toward him. He takes her hands in his and skates backwards, looking over his shoulder for stones frozen in the ice, then back at his daughter who, steady now, sees only what lies ahead.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Leaving St. Elmo</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>One-room cabin in an abandoned false-front town, the <strong>Divide</strong> off to the west, mountains honeycombed with all the old diggings. One winter, the only resident, I read old newsprint, learned to see <a href="/article/st-elmo"><strong>St. Elmo</strong></a> the way it once was—smelter smoke narrow-gauge high-grade dreams, before the paper dollar wrecked the gold and silver market and the railroad pulled out. My place, the only light for miles, threw its rays out toward the Milky Way. Woodstove, sleeping bag on the floor, cans of Del Monte Fruit, Campbell’s Soup, Maxwell House Coffee, mice snapping traps in the cup- board. Outside, night winds blew prospecting ghosts down the mountain. If the lower elevations called me now and then, it was only until the nightmares came: visions of après ski tights and fur jackets wandering the newly fern-barred streets of this ghost town turned resort, or worse, the old cabin surrounded by an invasion of doublewides, riding the wave of some meth-headed oil and gas boom. When the mine at Climax shut down, it was the bust that finally got to me—storefronts boarded up from Leadville to Salida, down-valley friends leaving the country, nights darker than the shafts inside the mountain above town. The two-lane that ran south by southwest over Poncha Pass and Wolf Creek slid down the switchbacks on the sunset side promising brighter lights . . . <em>Durango, Durango </em>. . . and possibility. So I folded up the map of home I’d made and it was adiós old shack, adiós old town, and hello to a road I couldn’t help but ride.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Querencia</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Is the space where we are most at home. The sound of the word takes me to water,<br />&#13; to the river maybe, the nose of a kayak in the heart of a wave, as it spills over a ledge<br />&#13; curls back upstream, crests and falls again crests and falls again and holds the boat<br />&#13; in place, as long as I dip paddle and rudder, keeping to the sweet spot, where the up<br />&#13; and down currents meet, where there is stillness in motion, where I am held letting<br />&#13; the sun slivered water slide by on the glassy edge of a hole in the river. Dwell as water<br />&#13; on water, blood on blood, surf the heart of it all. You are here, says querencia…in this<br />&#13; body, on this river, you are here.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Where I Am</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>I could tell you to turn east onto the county road just south of <strong>Moffat</strong>.<br />&#13; I could give you a street address and a phone number. I could tell you<br />&#13; we are the last house on the left before you hit Crestone creek.<br />&#13; I might suggest that you look for the vultures circling in the end-of-day<br />&#13; sky just west of the <strong>Sangre de Cristos</strong>. Maybe I’ll be there.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>But a part of me stays further south beyond the trailhead where<br />&#13; the Refuge begins. Check the creekbed that threads out into the<br />&#13; valley. Look for a western tanager perched on a cottonwood branch,<br />&#13; or a mountain bluebird that carries the sky across a hidden meadow,<br />&#13; where there is always a pool of dappled light, where it is so quiet<br />&#13; you can hear the dead sing.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Here the wind has scoured out the sand, except for a ridge <br />&#13; held in place by two old Ponderosas, down which a mothering elk<br />&#13; and her two calves descend at dusk for a drink from the creek. <br />&#13; Later, the stars ride by overhead—Cygnus, Delphinus, Aquila.<br />&#13; Even they are transient.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>I listen for whatever it is that stays.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes </em>(Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Deep Calls to Deep</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>End-of-day drive west of <strong>Gunnison</strong>, a perfect round sun behind the sky’s memory of wind and sand. See the truck, small as a toy out at peninsula’s end, and farther out, the man, only a dark speck at the far edge of lake-rim thaw. Has he heard how the ice broke up yesterday and stranded two fishermen from <a href="/article/denver"><strong>Denver</strong></a>? Does he listen now for the first hint of fracture, or is he lost in the depths where his silver spinner flickers past the big browns so lean and slow this time of year? Maybe it will draw them from their torpor, they will give chase, and he will feel again the pulse he cannot see, which passes as fast as his own, just enough to invite another cast, and another, into the last light … this man out fishing on the edge of the ice.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>True News from a Small Town Beat</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>“Give me all the money in your cash register,” he said.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Are you serious?” asked the night-shift clerk.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Yes,” the old man said.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Who do you think you are?”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Well, I never done <em>this </em>before . . . how much you got in your register, anyway?”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Not much,” she said.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Could you give me twenty dollars?”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“No, I can’t.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Howbout five?”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“No.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Well, howbout a pack of smokes?”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“I’ll give you a couple,” she said.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Bless you,” he said.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“He was desperate,” she would say later on.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Police are investigating.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Bats</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>You look down into the shaft of an abandoned iron mine, a dark mountain portal into a deep cavern. Your vision takes you only partway to the source of a slight breeze. Waiting for the bats is like dwelling in the borderlands between waking and sleeping. How long, how long? Then a deep stirring and the early thread of the dream appears. Only a few bats, thousands more will follow, riding this mountain tide into a world where you are a stranger. You know they listen to echoes that you can’t hear. You admire their pirouettes as they emerge. Here, in the foothill twilight, what matters is the way they rise into a vast, whirling column. What matters is the breeze and the sound, like moving water, they leave in their wake. What matters is this great river of wings that ends as it begins. In darkness. Now you know where the night comes from.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Fireflies</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>I learned a long time ago that your light wouldn’t last till morning. I know now that your scientific name is <em>Lampyridae</em>, that the organ on your abdomen secretes your light, that you flicker for mates, sometimes for prey, that some of you eat only pollens and nectars, that some of you follow slime trails left by slugs which you eat with your long, grooved mandibles, that you must avoid frogs who gorge on you till they glow, that sometimes, say in the Great Smoky Mountains or in the jungles of Malaysia, you gather in great swarms and flash your lights in sync.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>          We have satellites that sweep across the sky—in sync with a super clock in Boulder, accurate to a millionth of a second—which help us aim our missiles. And we have many earthbound lights … lit cigarettes trailing home from the bars at closing time, pickups throwing their high beams down dark county roads, the flicker of prairie towns seen from airplane windows.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>          We are here, they all say. And you’re on your own, the night says back.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Barbies in the Backcountry (South San Juans)</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>The first time I notice the Barbies we are a mile in from the trailhead. I see them strapped to my youngest daughter’s pack as if taken hostage. The Barbies could care less that the load we have carefully packed onto our four-legged porter, a burro named Sabina, is listing to the left and about to flop over. One of the Barbies looks at me, pouty, sassy—<em>Oh, you’re, like, so incompetent</em>—as I try to shift the load back into place.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>When the Barbies make their next appearance, I am secretly happy they have been liberated from my daughter’s pack, stripped naked, and set afloat in a very cold mountain stream. The Barbies ride the current, their long, slinky legs goose-bumping off creek-bed cobbles and their carefully coiffed hair trailing like algae behind them. <em>Get me … like … out of here</em>.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>How strange this must be for the Barbies … to be without their closets full of Barbie clothes, without their pink Corvettes and mini cell phones, hundreds of miles from the nearest mall, headed into a long night with a cold bivouac ahead of them. As if their creek immersion weren’t enough, they are now perched in a remnant snowbank near our high-altitude camp, legs akimbo in exotic yoga positions. <em>Hellowwwwwww </em>…<em> we’re Barbies not G.I. Joes! </em></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Poor Barbies. They are now huddled together in a large woolen mitten, having weathered the night dressed only in pink evening gowns. <em>We didn’t … like … sign up for this</em>. And yet they are smiling in the morning sun, as if maybe they are proud of their new survival skills.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>I am glad that my daughters set the terms when the Barbies come to play, and not the other way around.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; &#13; <h3>Riding the Tongue</h3>&#13; &#13; <p>I heard about it all on the way to the river. You had taken a pass on all the gadgets that might win you a few more days to breathe. In your own voiceless way, you told them to keep it real and take you home.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>That night, while the summer meteors flashed across the Milky Way, I held you in a prayer, without purpose or destination per- haps, other than the moment it made. Clear. Your eyes. Deep like the trout-finning pools in the river below camp.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Next morning, I forgot about you. It was the light playing on the water. You know how it is. You paddle through it, mesmerized by the shimmer of it all, riding its shine like dragonflies delirious in their coupling flight.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>We camped above the big rapid that night, the one we feared the most. I was listening to the crickets—those that drone and those that chant—when a screech owl flew out of its own silhouette and took its shadow downstream.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>By then you were at home, maybe in a bed beside the window, looking out on the mountain whose thermals you knew well. Below our camp, the owl perched above that glassy slant of water at the top of the rapid—the tongue that always says “over here”—and the current that would glide us, come morning, beyond the ledge where the river disappears.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Copyright 2017 Peter Anderson</p>&#13; &#13; <p>This prose poem appears in <em>Heading Home: Field Notes</em> (Bower House Books)</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/language-arts" hreflang="en">Language Arts</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/psychology" hreflang="en">Psychology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/crestone" hreflang="en">crestone</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/social-studies" hreflang="en">Social Studies</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-history" hreflang="en">colorado history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/geography" hreflang="en">Geography</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sociology" hreflang="en">Sociology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/biology" hreflang="en">Biology</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/science" hreflang="en">science</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p><a href="http://panderson.ag-sites.net//">http://panderson.ag-sites.net//</a></p>&#13; &#13; <p><a href="https://coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/anderson_peter/">Colorado Poets Center: Peter Anderson</a></p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Tue, 25 Sep 2018 22:28:00 +0000 admin 2962 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org