wandering words

There are so many messages I can't interpret.
The hundred maples at the edge of my street shout orange, orange,
orange, in silent voices. And may say more if I could decipher.

How I want to understand the many calls of the birds migrating through
on their long journey. And what is the message of the shaggy
wave-curled sea quarreling around the black rocks out at the far point?

Perhaps words themselves wander off into other fields, like sheep lost
in the depths of the hills beyond the local hills so the shepherd has to
go climbing up and down, his legs aching, his breath heavy
in his chest until he spies them off there under

that far evergreen, and wrestles them down and brings them home.
 - Patricia Fargnoli
Pastoral
Then, Something
zen humanism
journal of a nobody
a poet reflects

sheep Girl

She held the flock, terrified, eyes abulge,
Huddled and frantic, tight as a knot
At the edge of Indian Highway 160
Fronting the big truckers balling that jack,
Throwing fists of rusty gravel
At the bellwether helter-skelter.
Her two Rez dogs nipped the laggards’ heels
So the fold held close on the threshold.

Thin and long and maybe fifteen
Willowy and ivory smooth
Her blue jeans tight on filly hips.
Awhirl, her long black hair,
Her neck all snap and pivot.
As she watched the trucks come hurtling
Then the sheep
Then the trucks come hurtling.

Then through a break in the careening rush
She bolted like a frightened colt
All knees and wild elbows
The Rez dogs springing and wailing
So the fold held close
And made the other side.

And I only just caught it
If caught it aright I did
Out the rear view mirror.
The Navajo sheep girl
All Indian, real Indian
Here on the Big Rez Crossing 160 and swallowed by the night.
Lost to the cowboy’s July Fourth charade,
Unsullied by fireworks and revival tent Jesus.

From Mountain Wizard, by Thomas J. Phalen.

Harbingers

“And put out the servant who is of no profit into the outer dark: there will be weeping and cries of sorrow.”Gospel of St. Matthew

Two ravens traced the pewter sky
Like etchings scratched above the trees.
Peremptory, unhurried, removed,
Wheeling like so much give a damn against the setting sun.
Big as black of night,
Smug as crabbed unsmiling butlers
Or sour priests, contemptuous of some apostasy,
All black hat and cassock.

Three bats circled the house at dusk,
Crazy erratic and day-blind
Darting and tumbling in the outer dark
Predictably at close of day.
Sprung from somnolent secret dayshade
Silhouettes against the nickel sky
Carving the wind with cutlass wings
Their peeps mere hints in the gloom.

It’s all about death, the macabre, and madness
On their wings here in the woods.
They’re freighted heavily for all that
With storied loathing and dread,
Lurching through the darkling, evermore,
Unshriven, feared, and despised.
Just like those pretty girls in Salem
Whose fatal youth the pinched old ladies envied so.

From Mountain Wizard, by Thomas J. Phalen.

 

Tinker’s Penny

“Non, je ne regrette rien.” - Edith Piaf

She was a delicate mountain flower
A trifling unremarkable darling
An inconsequential diminutive.
But she made my juices flow
And in them my head swam.

She was the petaled perfume
Of my one time, forever, spring.
And I loved her well -
The best I could -
In my rounder’s heyday.

She was a precious copper
In this wanderer’s pocket, dispossessed,
In my gaudy wagon, spent,
On the back roads’ secret waysides
My hammer on tin.

What was this treasure, once in my hand,
That I tossed unthinking for a pebble
And now is gone,
Lost all ways,
Beneath concentric rings?

From Mountain Wizard by Thomas J. Phalen, an Irish-American poet friend.

drawing up

It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.
 - Robert Bly  

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