| Judith Barrington USA
judithb@pacifier.com
CROWS Crows startle the clouds with grievances never resolved and warnings blurted into thin air. Once in a while, the cries of all those who tried to survive pour from the funnels of their throats. No wonder we never really listen. Like most animals, crows tell the truth: working hard to penetrate our tiny tubular ears, they cackle on telephone lines while we watch TV. Once I did listen to a crow, but even when I had heard his whole story, there was nothing I could do. Next, I thought, I'd have to listen to squirrels and coyotes. I like to think I deal with my share of rotten truths but I couldn't bear to kneel down in damp grass and listen to the hedgehog or the mole. [Published in Poems & Plays Number six, and in Poetry London, Spring 2000] RIMAS DISSOLUTAS AT CHACALA BEACH, MEXICO Not waving but drowning - Stevie Smith Not even your hand reaching from the past as you go down into the Atlantic keeps me from the sea. Pacific waves like trucks crash down on me, my legs tugged away in an avalanche of sand. Sometimes I fall, suck in a snatch of salty air and skid into the cave of the next wave, only to be hauled back to the tideline with bottle caps, shells and small green beads. With an arm raised, that visual cliché, is not how you went down I'm sure-it's how we went down in the pool at Black Rock: leggy ten-year-olds each holding her nose with one hand and reaching up with the other in that mocking gesture of despair. Down we went, face to face, our hair loosing small bubbles as it streamed upwards and we stared like mermaids into that liquid underworld, clear and paint blue, its only known danger a dose of chlorine that left us headachy and pink- eyed, our swimsuits smelling of hospital by the long day's end. Did we sense then, as our lungs screamed for air and our cheeks bulged with held breath, that this transparent wall could surge into the hollows of our lungs and turn us to weed? The fact is that after a while I couldn't stop. Rhythmically, alone, I surged up, grabbed a mouthful of air and sank, my arm marking the spot in a drama that would never end. As it turned out, it was a kind of defiance of the future as it is now of the past when I breast the Pacific, ignoring the call of your hand in the air as Atlantic swells cover your head. [Published in The GSU Review, Spring 1999] HARVEST When you're young and out at night searching for your lost pony the black sky leans on your shoulders like a rucksack full of sins. Under invisible stars you carry the burdens: gates left unlatched; temper-tantrums that sent the pony bucking away in his field and all those times you laughed at the farmer, a dour man who watched the sky as harvest approached- watched the corn ripen while you and your pony cut the corners of those brittle fields, flattening his bread and butter. When you're young and out at night calling for your black pony through field after field of grain an owl flings itself down from an oak and you make vows. If only you could find the pony but remember too the vows you make and remake on a dark night, searching. [Winner of The Portland Poetry Festival contest. Published in Callapooya Collage] INERADICABLE Sigmund Gundle 1915 - 1996 He'll never forget their names: daughter grand-daughter, sister, late wife. He'll always know where he parked the car and what he went to the store for in the first place. The President's name, today's date, his favorite brand of coffee-all etched like the names of the dead in a granite wall, alphabetical. Memory's like that, isn't it?- dark gray wall, file cabinet, a great room with newspapers piled in rows by date and place all of them recording news of a life from gossip column to missile attack to the daily puzzle. Or, of course, it's a computer: cerebral megabytes swallow the story chapter by chapter until the hard drive crashes What he thought could never be lost, is lost: names escape through paneless windows, streets sprout unexpected turns and faces float away from their old histories. He turns his wheelchair to block the corridor; nurses beg him to move but he waves them away shouting in German. So much is erased but this he'll remember and remember: the camp; the guards; yellow star; dead mother. [Winner of the 2002 Clackamas Review Poetry Contest. Published in Clackamas Review, fall 2002]
© All Copyright, Judith
Barrington. |
