Mike Cluff- A Poem

             Ombre

Potash is too nearby
washed down from the yellowooded hills
but too far away
from where the huckleberries,
the magic of my youth,
sleep until some winters
so distant to count towards
slip them out
into reams of blue lichen
carpals
and fibulas looked scorched.

Pot-au-feu
in a sauce
of ash and asperity
will be served no more
this week
to a quadroon
of no one's making.