As Mourning Doves Persist

1. In the music is a trumpet. In the trumpet, a man’s breath. The night is littered with secrets. The path through the dark is lined with manicured hedges which someone has trimmed to resemble the cursive letters of the alphabet. Gardener infatuated with the beginning and the end. In the middle is a lone violin. The breath of the instrument is tainted with the death of a child that we realize is the fault of the crowd. The crowd hold their hands slack against their ears. I am hungry. The trumpet is playing faster. Metal shears are found in a body of water. The innocent, put on trial. The crowd has carried a piano into the court room and are splintering it into firewood to burn on the lawn. The final breaths of the sound nearly exhausted, leave only the single horn of a barge on the water. Crawling. We have made our way finally to the table to dine. We attempt to fabricate orchestra with utensils, beating the surface where the child once ate al...

The guide inside the old roller mill says: gravity fed . The kernels never crushed just tumbled. He points out the holes cut in ragged circles in the base of the wooden doors through which the resident cat can move freely, seeking mice that eat the grain in the night.  We track the river outside from its tributary origin through wooden aqueducts. To the big wheel that holds to the east wall. My companion says listen to the under sound. A thrum and a throb. This natural spill, the mother of all movement, propelling the greasy gears and the fraying belts. Wheat washed and dried and captured in centrifugal precision. Up from the basement clank and down again slide into the shimmy boxes. Pulled to its next box and spun. Silk tunnels and blue muslin stretched over tubes take their time rolling today as we tour. One single thump from metal phalange on top - like piano hammer, like heavy knife - and the dust moves down and out. Tumble and sift. White flour stripped of eve...

Rising from a slice of dark night  crow and hobgoblin dreams of doubt, a petite bright eye turns over in her crumpled morning nest. There we witness the work of trickster dared who has plaited and placed a whimsy crown atop the unconscious slumber of this precious nuthatch noggin. Is this an exercise , starling coos, just waking unanticipated occasion to be other, taller, more majestic? I needed a little trim , she warbles to herself, just to take the extra away  but instead  this natural extension, perhaps, is the pristine, greener me .  Imagine what the pufflings and keet will make of me now , formerly hidden within the party, wishing secretly instead  to wedge with swans. (for my friend)

Morton repeats his stories of naval days again to no one in particular as he chain smokes in the room where we are seated.  I was on the USS Missouri when  the Japanese surrendered, and there are  the black and white photographs on the wall to prove it, he sputters pointing with the tip of his cigarette. Though everyone in the photographs is about one quarter inch tall and I had little to no knowledge of history much less ships or sea despite a decent high school education.   His wife holds an ice cube to my left ear as she prepares to pierce the virgin lobe.  Their son, my crush, cruises the neighborhood to score a five-finger baggie of grass which will likely be mostly stems and seeds. Back then we were only so particular.  Morton is three sheets to the wind at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and gets mighty angry when interrupted. Their charcoal myna bird in a cage in the corner of the den repeats family expletives. After a while this isn't cha...

Begin with the sounds of my husband in the kitchen pouring freshly boiled water through a beige paper filter that folds over and hisses just the tiniest bit in the insignificant mishap. He yelps like he does to himself, and even from two rooms removed it irritates me like he’s a person touched and unstable, and I get up and shut the door to my study and pretend I don’t know him and am anywhere else where the coffee is dripping perfectly or waiting for the lightest press of palm against top against spring, against ebony grounds, and an aroma of pungent perfection is squeezed heavenward; Start again. The full, running water in the bathroom where our daughter showers, the most Olympic shower in the history of twenty-one-year old girls, like swimming the length of two oceans to achieve both cleanliness and a certain sheen of muscular endurance raising her arms to lather and rinse, lather and rinse again;  straining the patient endurance of her parents who, when the utility bi...

Imagine President Mandela steps through  your grocery store.  He bends to speak  with the children like Jesus, h andles  the smooth curve of a single red apple. He remembers something he’d nearly  forgotten that he loved -             cone of honey colored sugarcane             pomegranate, tough and succulent. And he turns back into the fluorescent aisles, says             please, move on              up in front of me   nods at the cashier, t aking note of her name –              Audrey If Nelson Mandela shopped at your supermarket he would leave a handprint on the freezer doors, he would bend to speak to the children. Excerpted from  The Shape of Caught Water available from Red Mountain Press or direc...