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THE DAY MY GRANDMOTHER
TOOK TO HER PEN
- for Ida Noble
In 1927, that dashing cowboy
of your poems rode west
on a Motor Transit bus, took
his money and your heart
to Southern California, left
you, the mother of his seven,
his name,
those seven, and
a glittering illusion of
Stetson,
bandanna,
chaps, and
jingling spurs.
Did you ever smile again?
MY SISTER FINALLY SENT
THE FAMILY PHOTOS
For one hour I sat, mesmerized, sifting
a hundred years between my fingers, the
same fingers, notice, that clutch a piece of
paper in the shot of Great Grandmother Brown
posed by a morning glory vine on a barn that
probably still stands near Shawnee, Oklahoma.
I lay them out, one by one, faces of blue-eyed
men and black-eyed women who came west by
covered wagon to produce my parents. That
jaw, those ears-- why my son looks like that!
And so the genes continue, weaving through
the generations. That 1880 face, created afresh in
the 1980's is napping in her bunk upstairs,
that shock of hair is combed each day in Berkeley,
and at this particular instant those eyes
gaze out the window of a southbound Greyhound
bus on a lonely northern Arizona road.
The genes survive, but not the names. Those
are gone, carved in marble--all save one who
left no forwarding address, one who (judging
from tales I've heard third-hand) now roams
the teeming streets of downtown L.A.
THE LAST CRYSTAL SWAN
We cannot be preoccupied with life, it is
too fleet (like the night), too ephemeral
(like mimosa blossoms or balloons),
too slippery (like a ripe peach with its
skin slipped after a dip in boiling water).
Let's not waste time concerned with things
of limited existence, say ten, fourscore,
occasionally more, but often less --
transitory delights that melt away like
ice carvings at a summer banquet.
Let's endure life, yes -- and use it, yes,
but scarcely toss it a bone in the spending,
giving prolonged thought only to what
remains when candlelight and fruit and
flowers are gone, and all the balloons
are flaccid or in shreds, and the
last crystal swan has metamorphosed
into a pool of tepid water on an ornate
silver tray long before the end of the party.
SINGING WITH DAISY
She's just an old yellow coyote,
that Daisy--
the half that's supposed to be
dog doesn't even show.
Tail like a deer --
scruffy, white along the edges,
scarcely seven inches long --
not a dog you'd look at
twice. But when she sings --
and all I have to do to make her
sing is throw back my head --
when Daisy sings, she becomes
a creature to notice. We howl
and wail our inter-species duet:
her mellow contraltooooo, a bit of
vibratooooo here and there, and my
wobbly soprano -- strictly human
with no memory whatever of the
eons of canine pain and joy her song
evokes. Her mournful howl reaches
clear back to the dawn of creation,
I'd reckon -- and all my voice can
recall is a few short summers and
my utter delight in singing with Daisy.
THE TRASH IS BURNING SLOWLY TONIGHT
There is only one moon
tonight
and one star.
The moon hangs
low in the darkening sky
and a little to the west.
Tree fingers tickle the moon.
The star, out of reach,
laughs.
NO U-TURN
I've noticed how old women
finger their faces when they
talk, groping for some familiar
landmark from the old life,
as if it could be rediscovered in
a peach-smooth cheek, a tame
eyebrow or a hairless chin.
Old men search elsewhere,
squinting into the ever-receding
distance as if one slightly stronger
prescription lens were all that's
needed to see a grove of fertile
years just beyond the horizon.
Ann Applegarth was awarded an Academy of American Poets prize at the University of New Mexico in 1980, and her work has appeared in publications such as Westwind Review, Bellowing Ark, Conceptions Southwest, St. Anthony Messenger, Ruah, Sin Fronteras, and Christianity and Literature and anthologized in Shadow & Light: Literature and the Life of Faith, and Earthships: A New Mecca Poetry Collection. She lives, writes and occasionally teaches in Roswell, New Mexico.(December 2005, April 2008).
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