Clarence Wolfshohl
Patience, Audubon, PhoebeAudubon sat in a cave
for days—I don’t know if also the nights—to grow familiar to a nesting phoebe. He wished to tie a string to her leg to see if she’d return to the same nest the next year. He read while he sat, only moving his eyes, his hands and wrists to turn the pages. I don’t know what he read. His plan worked. The next spring the phoebe returned and sat unmoving watching Audubon. After three days she tied a string around his ankle. We've Dreamed Ourselves CrowsWe’ve dreamed ourselves crows
these later years to overcome the pain of our desire. We’ve cartwheeled on splayed ragged feathers stretching for eager pleasure. Fractured and fused into focus, our black silhouettes pulse on the air. We could dream eagles, our regal dalliance a tight grappling and still balance aloft, or birds of paradise in stately plumes preening toward our courtly convergence. But we are crows that bounce in jocular foreplay and climax with wild caws of delight. On the Way to the FuneralI saw an eagle rise from the roadway.
Powerful strokes lifted it through the heavy air. The white of its tail opened a door beyond the day, for an instant, and wings enraged the smoldering sun into brilliance. At the funeral, I saw many old friends and colleagues: more and more, that’s where I see these people. I had seen the one we buried only two months ago, at a gathering honoring friends who were moving to their daughter’s in Illinois. He looked healthy and hopeful; now he’s dead. We’re all getting there, to our children’s or the grave. The eagle circled and swooped around the chapel, sparks emitting from its ponderous wings striking the flint of all our aging bodies. We all glistened, for an instant, crimson and gold and flew with the eagle. Mozart in the TropicsMozart sat at the piano
the most of every day, and scorpions lived in the cracks of the notes he played. Not Viennese bon vivants, but iguanas climbed rock walls to sit outside his studio and hear the scorpions call. While geckos and constrictors wrestled catch-as-catch-can in passing notes eerily dolce, Die Zauberflöte screeched centipedes into flocks of parrots squawking in the minor keys, hordes of mosquitoes snapping their fingers to Rimsky-Korsakov as fast as bees. Wolf TreeIt stands alone on the last bend
of the road before I’m home. Its limbs spread fifty feet from the massive trunk, burled grotesque from broken limbs, its crown broad and flat. Yards away is the wall of the woods; the wolf oak’s millions of siblings stretch miles toward Missouri bottomland. They spire upward, limbs turned skyward toward the sun. They grow straight, no blemish of burl nor gnarl of wind. When I split their wood against winter cold, the grain is long and my maul cleaves the logs with ease, but the wolf turns my ax and maul into toys that bounce off or get trapped in its sinews. The wolf howls defiance. ❧ |
The Sign-PainterHe’s one of those cantankerous Missourians,
like the old man down at Jerome with his Trail of Tears memorial, said voices told him to build it, voices of Cherokee who crossed that way to Oklahoma, so he did. Concrete statues, wishing wells, A white buffalo. Jesse’s Howard’s shrine was of words painted on signs. No voices, just his begrudged self. The town now calls the hill Sign-Painter. He called it Sorehead Hill. Covered it with signs and wonderers-- windmills and crude wooden planes, spinning and catching uplifts among outlaw words. The black and red words of Biblical import, of outraged justice, of municipal resistance. The pointed fingers punctuating the text like the thump of hallelujah. The Woman Who Took Everything
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