for Regina
I’ll fall where I damn well please.
Victoria Edwards Tester, Rain
There’s a place that snow turns into mist
where silence is a road
that runs where miners once
hauled ambition up from
the desert on wheels that complained all the way.
They opened the earth up long enough
to find there was less silver
than in the winter trees, and so they
loaded their wagons with disappointment
and went back down into
the heat with whiskey as the devil leading
the way. Juncos and siskins
gather now and pick
what they can from the cold.
Watching is belonging here for a few
December days in the company
of birds and frost a short drive from
desert on the foxes’ trail. The angels
overhead remember where
each of us has come from
before arriving in a country filled
with thorns and rocks patrolled by
coyotes. To each
a shadow falls from a hawk ever present
like a handkerchief dropped
by the gods
onto the paths we have chosen.
It isn’t ore that draws us, there
are no drills or shovels
for reaching into secrets the land possesses,
just the moments drifting down
at year’s end with a star
in every flake. The saints of the season
kick back and let the sycamore
shine white on white
while oaks and pines bear the weight
of memory in their boughs
until the sky cracks open for more snow
to fall, the now snow, the childhood snow,
the snow of joys and sorrows, snow
as a gift, snow as a razor, white, white,
white with the single red flash in
a string of stinging peppers hung against the snow,
snow that picks the desert as a home just
because it damn well wants to.
David Chorlton
.