John Swain- Three Poems

View from Huckleberry Ridge

Air sounds a mourning song through the high trees

hollowed by woodpeckers on the palisade.

Coyotes stepped leaving tracks inside deer tracks shining

in the remaining patches of February snow.

The limestone ridge extended like a horse’s back

bisecting the bowl of ponds and meadows.

I slid in descent on the side of wet leaves and loose rocks

thrilled to be safely falling

like the expanse of bronze grasses writhe delighting in wind

as two red hawks called from the next knob hill over.

Distant rifle fire emptied the sky

still as the frozen waterfalls along the forking streams,

the convergence creates a green river to be my twin.

A fence impasse at the lower fields flowing

gold beneath the black hill,

I held the rusted barbed wire to count like komboloi

calming our hands to climb again

through the valleys cut with water in our new shape.

Chadron Butte

 

Loud over the hill this thunder like a buffalo,

grey sage uprooted in the high wind singing

as I turned my head toward the prairie falcon

limitless dizzying me between the cliffs.

Sky wind in the grass travels like green fire

up the ochre rocks piled for the rattlesnake

shining diamond in a coil like my bandanna,

I bundled snapped flowers with a blue string.

Sunlight still on me until the rain swims in blood

rushing through the narrow ravines

as cloud people drift to a horizon of lightning

riding over the plains to the dark north.

I climbed through my throat to eat at my shadow

spreading like nightfall over the ground,

now only my bones glowed sewn in the shape

of a great love hunting the wild like wolf jaws.

Confluence Point, Missouri

Crossing the field as dark rivers merge

in the savaging throat of a windstorm,

I listen to the confluence

like father and mother in their primality.

Still winter in silver the waters

vow to carry the mountainside down

strong as the eagles who follow her length

back to a birthing source in the north.

I weakened in the cold

and watched the bridges extinguish in fog

as a stone face shone on the cliff wall.

This enigmatic sky continues in white

like the spectral bride

of horses gallops through broken trees.

John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Red Paint Hill published his first collection, Ring the Sycamore Sky.