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Clarence Wolfshohl


Patience, Audubon, Phoebe

​Audubon 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 Crows

We’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 Funeral

I 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 Tropics

Mozart 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 Tree

It 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.
​
​
              ❧
Picture

Clarence Wolfshohl Profile

The Sign-Painter

He’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 
​to Heart  ☊

​When the surgeons opened her heart
while keeping theirs closed, heads
in control, they found kitchen appliances
from 1935 on, refrigerators and blenders
she had set hers on as a bride,
ten foot high Nebraska snowdrifts
that never melted, one thousand miles
of dirt and gravel road crammed
in a 1915 Model-T sedan,
packing crates of grapefruits--
Ruby Reds from the Rio Grande Valley--
several men in various stages
of tenderness, one with a ring,
children in snapshots wearing cowboy
boots and poodle  skirts, bouquets
of faded camellias and tables
of card games, grudges with salt
at the temples, some completely gray
or bald, sensible nursing shoes
sticking out tongues, missed
opportunities and occasions,
stale sentiments and promises,
cross words and gentle joshing.
The doctors sutured everything back in,
intricate needlework across her chest,
knew if they cleaned it out,
she would float away.
​

Sunday Morning Bagels
                    Albuquerque, 1967

Laundry was our Sunday morning chore.
Up the street we’d tote our clothes tossed
in twisted compromised positions, box
of Tide, and a book or two for waiting.
During the wash cycle, we read; the dry cycle
was for our Sunday morning bagel and cream cheese.
 
Two doors down from the laundromat
was a diner that served a bagel, sliced,
and a small cup of cream cheese for fifty cents.
Bagels were as rare in the high desert
Southwest as tortillas on Long Island,
and neither of us had ever tasted one
before our first Sunday at the laundromat.
 
Often down to coins, risking pink underwear,
we combined whites and colored garments in one load,
or not dry pieces that could drape over chairs
 and curtain rods in our apartment,  to save
a quarter toward the bagels. Sometimes
we shared one bagel, flipping
our last penny for the crunchy top half.
 
They were toasted golden and the cream cheese
melted into the soft dough.  Sometimes
the girl behind the counter gave us a cup
of coffee on the house, and we’d sweeten
the blackness with real sugar, nibble squirrel-
sized bites from the bagel and sip the hot brew,
our eyes twisted together like the garments in our bag.
​

Morning on Blue Mesa

High on Blue Mesa
ice crystals sparkle
on the camper ceiling,
the sun slanting off lake waves.
 
You burrow into your sleeping bag,
and I climb from the pick-up
to start a fire, make coffee.
It’s August, hot down the mountain.
 
The sun is three fingers
above the eastern rim
turning from its dawn red
to morning yellow,
 
but when I look
to the noise of your rising,
it gleams a radiance
of blue in your eyes.

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***

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