Blackberry Brambles & Iron Gate

Blackberry Brambles

The brambles bear fat blackberries
And the holly, berries rouge.
The cornflower blooms in the thick sedges
Among the bracken and the broom.

Sheep fleece, tatters in the thorns,
Mocks the bog cotton in the furze,
Snippet flags wispy in the turf smoke wind
That carries the squall gushing

Across Achill and the Sound
Past the Deserted Village
And its famine ghosts of the Slievemore Road,
Tramping on the hard wind up Clew Bay.

The light awash and broken, shimmering,
On the foot of Croagh Patrick
Its head torn with clouds
Hung across the cold tide.

Iron Gate

The rust in the black iron,
The pits in the tired mortar
Sloppy in the joints
Blasted by the rain, wind, and salt,
Nudged and scraped by the thistle and thorn
And the nettles, thick to the stone wall,
Thorny and nettlesome nettles stinging.

The tidy cottage
Whitewashed onto the hill
Too tight to the road,
So close it scares you,
Just there behind the iron gate,
Arust on its crumbling flanges.

From Achill Sounds, a collection of poems by Thomas J. Phalen, a friend. 

operating Instructions For Plants

not hanford nuclear plants
mind you

filled with radio
active frequency shifts 
seeping, bleeding 
55 million barrels of

uranium
plutonium fool fuels

into down through

130 feet to Columbia River 
water table
transparent tables
where drowning skeletons devour 
questions 

old fears sifting
healthy dust, no.

these plants evolved in northwest 

Podocarpus, ‘maki’ loves some direct sun
needs to be in east winter window.

Ficus nerifolia, ‘willow leaf ficus’ bonsai
east window
watching for summer sunburn
likes dry air, misting is helpful.

Asparagus plumosus, ‘plumosa fern’
needs south window
during darker months
don’t water when soil still feels wet.

Dracaena compact will tolerate lower light
trim back to encourage branching.

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

tomita park, asahikawa

enter 
face 
stone basin water temple
clap hands three times

throw water
on grey stone guardian lions

red, orange, yellow leaves
fall 

into sky mirror reflections
escaping fresh snow dust 

old people shuffle along earth path
wearing intricate kimonos

designed by
stone 

Asahikawa loom creators 
weave wool season colors
into old mountain fabrics 

protecting brown bear families 
preparing their winter solitude

bow low 
o mountains
o west wind
o glorious lions 
at the entrance 

 

cross a border

I’m sitting in the air conditioned nightmare of an office and the maintenance chief comes by and tells me a little story.

He’s worried. He’s married to a woman from Mexico living here illegally. She migrated to the Pacific Northwest supporting herself doing migrant labor. Picking fruit. Delicious apples.

They met through friends, dated and got hitched. She doesn’t speak Engish and now they pay a lawyer BIG BUCKS to handle her immigration case getting exercise jumping through INS hoops and she’s preparing to head south and the chief’s afraid to death she will cross the border and never return.

In Mexico she broke down after her first husband, depressed about lack of work, sat down in front of her one night, opened a bottle of rubbing alcohol and drank the whole thing. He started foaming at the mouth, went into spasms and died in her arms as his liver broke down. 

That’s why she left.