DRY CRIK Journal

CONFERENCE

I draw a dozen breasts
on a wide sheet of paper,
give them wings & try
to disguise them as airplanes – fashioning
nosecones & propellers from the nipples.
But Mrs. Gray notices anyway
& my mother is called for an afterschool conference.
I’m outside on the emptied playground while they talk,
the chains of the swing
taut with my young weight.
There is a cottonwood tree
next to the swingset, & I try to rise
high into the opinion of leaves
where secret voices would tell me
what I should and shouldn’t do.

I think of Adrian dressing the indignant cat
in a gingham doll-dress. I think
of the scarecrow that wears my grandfather’s hat & count
the five clear notes of the churchbell down the road.
I wonder what it’s like to be the fish
swallowed by the larger fish. Then my mother
is walking toward me. “What happens now?” I say.
She lights a cigarette
& settles into the swing-seat next to me.
She doesn’t say anything but points
to the pale, indefinite moon
that floats above the cottonwood.
She exhales a sigh of smoke
& then pushes off from the sand, beginning a sway.
“See the moon up there?” she says, “Let’s see
if I can touch it with my feet.”

SHOSHONEAN

Every thing that roamed this world
had a song of its own.

The sky was something to be thought about.
Way out this way. Way out that way.

Black night. Black night.
This was on Coyote Lung Mountain,

when animals & humans
spoke the same language.

Blackbird, black seed, black obsidian bead.
And all things echoed

like an owl’s call in the black night,
every thing that roamed this world.

I myself am going back, he said.
Going back, he said.

Black night. Blackbird.
I myself am going back,

back to Coyote Lung Mountain.
Way out this way. Way out that way.