Poetry

Cinclus Mexicanus

 

After Jyl Hoyt

Blink white eyelids and dive    water ouzel     

O seer of all things submerged

American dipper   fresh water submarine    

Fly beneath the riffs and ripples

O ship of subsurface state

Fly beneath the surface roiled   your grey wings

Wily in search of larval tailed frogs

Stone fly    caddis flies

Salmon eggs

       Caddis fly    stone flies

Hop and dip from stone to stone   water ouzel

Bob your tail as you walk on the bottom

Biplane against the jet stream

You magnifique of physics

Starship battling the solar wind

Eponym of Irish ship and poems

English rivers 

Old world black birds extinct and living

O Water ouzel

American dipper

Larval tailed frog

Stone fly caddis fly

Salmon egg

   Caddis fly   stone fly
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Previously published in the Idaho Arts Quarterly 

Bard  

The poet’s big hands look like he’s handled

Lots of leather.   

Missing a digit.

   Caught     I imagine

Between his rope and saddle horn

And popped right off

While dallying his noose

Round the neck of a wild stallion

Bushy gray mustache  dusty black Stetson

Lyric on his lips  then caught on the drawl

That drips into the cleft of his chin

He recites verse concerning

     cremellos   duns    grullos

The poet  halts

The words trapped

In the back of his long throat

As if rounded up from the high sage plains

Then run down a thin canyon

Into a box    blocked off

And when they escape

Hooves thump and thunder

Dust clouded fetlocks

Wild   wild   whinnies
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Currently published at CowboyPoetry.com

The High Road from Ola

A bald-headed day

Tongue of sky dark

Licks the wind that roughs

The western horizon black

The head of the grosbeak

And scolds of Bullock’s orioles

Arrow leafed balsamroot

Stabs the noon-day light

Devoured by the vast tyranny of yellow

Lupine at attention in the spring green

Purple white and lemon-huffs

And the hills hasten to the mountains

And the penstemon’s lips succulent

Buds of bee-ing hums

And the devastation of beetles’ bark

Rendered to woodsman’s refuse

And Ponderosa chips that feed

The three great truths of spring 

Trillium  trillium  trillium

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 Previously published in the Idaho Arts Quarterly