Landscape with Wasps
Punctum
The Interior
Nocturne with Owls
Elegy with Sharp and Broken
Everything taken, donated to charity, except for your Little Wonder banjo, a pair of boots, a belt buckle, a paper on missile steering mechanisms, the farm ledger for crop yields. Except for magpies,
except for the river ribboning through the valley, the cow dog, wasp nests under the deck’s railings. Sleet comes to shroud it all, verglas in the weeds, a skeletal veil transforming into tracery, a snow lace, pearled
splinters slant-falling on a fence, clothesline, barn, the house. For a month, the dog carries a deer’s leg everywhere. Buries it, digs it up. Brute obsession in the bones of March.
Melancholy in a skein of geese, sight and sound, its corresponding waves. What is emotion, you say, but a series of electrical impulses. You, a scientist. You who refuse to look at old photographs,
Some of those people are gone now
you say, you don’t want to feel whatever it is: to be. It was positively your last winter. Mars a red dot juxtaposed next to a crescent, night-place where I turn the clock back, tick tock, the endless waiting,
Don’t touch that dial
You kids are gonna break it
the walls lying so I can’t recognize your voice anymore. All night I turn the dial. Radio in the room where I was a child. Radio what carries you off in the end. Here in the ghost-box. Your blue suit, your tie with silver tips. Six squares, eight exact angles, the tiny holes insomnia makes.
The river foregrounds its babbling, inside it, trout, smaller fish dart, drift along a pebble floor, on the banks, ants carrying broken crickets, the cunning moss covering over, stones, a sand bank, reeds.
Here the foragers, raptors, predators, prey, hunt, scavenge, feed below a fresco sky, ceiling of bas relief, trumpeting geese, spirals of hawks, cloud scatter. Fox hollows, owl holes, nesting grottos, badger dens,
beaver dams, deer beds, weasel tunnels, mar and make ruins, scars and hills on the valley floor. You there, irretrievable. Your house in the floodplain, two sheds on a knoll, the rusted tractor chained to a fence.
You never left. You never leave. The river drains, overflows in the not-human, a landscape etched in bestiary detail, infinite tableau. Theater of your final, unreadable mind.
Summer by the river
an owl kiting over
silent I have come to see
your grave sometimes you are
below its winged shadow open
arms of a saint Come to Jesus
on a billboard before the turn
after the bridge the dirt road
narrows to an owl
calls scurry
of a vole under leaves
its solid heart
sinew guts
you hear the owlets
on the phone of the wind
are you happy now are you happy now?
The horse explosive, snorting, turns its neck, waits for a sign
to say how hard the rain will be, what the storm will bring.
Clouds spun from water, dust molecules, particulates, balloon
out on the horizon, rush in and around the animal’s fear, which
thinks only to bust down the fence, run, horse fleeing up-wind,
horse fleeing dust-devils, a tumbleweed’s sharp, and so fails
to see below its feet the iron grid, ringing trap of a cattle guard,
and caught by a leg, the form felled.
Your father cried when he had to put that horse down
my mother said. The only time she’d ever seen him.
Some things can’t be fixed. The close-up, the detail,
is sound. Thunder, a gunshot, the bone splits, a cloud
bursts. It is hard to tell a raindrop from a tear.
Joni Wallace earned her MFA at the University of Montana and is the author of three books of poetry: Kingdom Come Radio Show, Barrow Street Press, 2016, finalist for the Colorado Prize, the Besmilr Brigham Award, Word Works’ Washington Prize, and AROHO’s To the Lighthouse Award; Blinking Ephemeral Valentine Four Way Books, 2011, winner of the Levis Prize (selected by Mary Jo Bang); Redshift (Kore Press, 2001), which garnered a fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she teaches at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
