Friday, May 20, 2016

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.



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