Joan Colby- Three Poems

BURIAL

Once a year I pull the sour weeds

That threaten their names. The dates

That bracket like the gates of paradise

In which I disbelieve. Their bones prefigure the shape

Of destiny. That’s what I think.

The empty holes they stared from generously

At the only child they made. Holes they

Breathed from when air was their

Dimension. Teeth and jaw that clamped

On praise or chastisement. The morbid chants

Of childhood where the worms

Go in and out are cancelled by the comfort

Of how they must be stripped

Now of all corruption. That I can walk over

Their bodies is a proof that they existed,

That they are more than scattered ash,

Cast away. As if that could matter.

As if anyone could rise

To judgement. Everything I disbelieve remains

Below the frostline in the earth I love.

RIVER RATS

Each river makes a valley,

Sometimes with a plunge,

Elsewhere just a sloping

Of slow erosion the way parting

Can be easy, not the occasion

Of curses and thrown utensils.

What it means to live by a river’s

Philosophy is that floods are expected

And you accept that mud wall-to-wall

Will be scraped and shoveled. That toil

Is part of it. So why would you

Choose something preposterous

As drowning, just for a season of watching

Leaf boats whirl in the current.

It might have been love or something like it,

The consistency of its passage

From one dam to the next

Where it drops into the boil,

The mixmaster that takes you down

And holds you and holds you.

SINKHOLES

As a boy, my father picnicked

in the Devil’s Punch Bowl—

A hundred feet deep with trees whose canopies

Feathered  the top.  They would climb down

Amid giant ferns to seek the delicate

Maiden Hair where rich hammock soil and rains

Established  a fairyland. They spread the cloths

To  lunch on sandwiches, potato salad, pickles,

Then toiled wearily up the sides, gripping roots,

Lugging the ferns they would  replant in pots.

At the summit, the horses waited patiently

To pull the wagons home.

Today, geologists are testing circumference,

Ordering evacuations. The earth is not solid.

Foundations cannot be trusted.

Imagine sleeping as the cavern

Beneath your bedroom gapes

And with a rush you descend

Into the heart of limestone,

The porous misadventure of

Geology.