James Robert Rudolph- Three Poems

James Robert Rudolph is a retired psychologist and teacher having returned to old haunts in northern New Mexico after a busy career in Minneapolis.  He believes in old-style magical realism, that inspired by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the high desert, and the deep, broad sky of the American mountain west.  Creatively he aspires to crafting of work that expresses honest experience in beautiful language, complex or simple, as serves the work’s purpose.  Recent poems have appeared in The Artistic Muse, Mad Swirl, Black Heart Magazine, and Poetry Super Highway, among others.

Destiny’s A Dirty Business

The American west created by gods

a place for them to dwell, great halls

of mountains, cleansing spare deserts

by waters blued

with spirits.

From these gods

came those that

the tides tugged who

understood voices in the wind,

they who gouged no scars.

Then others, outsiders

appeared some maybe borne of

the dropped scat of an unclean bird

or a bacillus that rode the wind and

these grew, such blackened growths

bubbled and gristly, setting deeply

searching roots to choke a heart.

So no blessings come

to wash clean these

disgraced lands as an exile

settles in burning a hole clear through

this bitter ragged heart.

Heading for Pasture

Hobbled horse ignoring a

stilled dray wagon a

long dried teat that

this horse too rusticating

sway of back and hock

of dirty bone with hoof

gummy, pitted the

yellow-dun color

of desert backwash.

To hold no more

desired cargo this wagon

light as an unhoused womb

and this horse of

balding fetlock and

hay-stained teeth a

forgotten ruminant.

Indian Summer, Minnesota

A warm afternoon, after

the white death of frost on green,

a day seen through a glass of weak tea,

golden, brown, an old color photograph,

aging.

Like your last hours with

a frail lover,

a day of sweet, doomed longings

poised, so fragile, before winter,

that thug of seasons.

The watery light,

a softest voice still heard,

this light hanging coronas

on us all.

In this dreamy light,

it is all so easy.

But this day is a charming coward,

too skittish, it scatters like

a pile of pretty leaves in that

bullying north wind, and

I am left behind once more.

This light, this day,

a mayfly’s heart beating,

within each, quickened

by the cold of a setting sun.