Mirage drinking
It is true there is only
so much water you can
drink—but you can
drink fantasy liquid
forever.
There is more than one way
to drink in a chimera
with her red-desert hair
thrown to the wind,
her body piled
onto mesas of sand.
Your body is not cast
iron like that man
standing on the corner
in Winslow, Arizona,
forever contemplating
the seven women
of the Eagles’ song.
The eighth woman,
redemption, is nowhere
to be seen (at least not
at McDonalds—to find her
a man has to do more
than come to her
thirsty).
And after all, your body
is no empty glass
even on dry desert days:
heroic as your thirst might be,
you are no match for the drinker
in the African tale who
swallowed up a lake
to rescue a woman
whose lover secreted her
under its waters.
To redeem a woman
that way, you’d have
to drink more than
sugared Dr. Pepper--
you’d have to go beyond
taking in water in the desert.
You’d have to drink
a whole mirage dry.
Disclaimer
I can’t tell you what the raven
says to her mate in the nest:
I have only seen her fly,
speaking to the wind—
while I eavesdrop.
If I claim
to follow the sap
up some great tree,
don’t listen:
I am not the rain
she answers to.
There is a singular
language in which
bark and water
speak to one another
and I do not
own it.
If I bring you a bell
that rings in the wind
remember it stops
when the wind stops.
There is mere gossip
on my side of the
continental divide--
though that does not stop me
from trying to seduce you
across the line.
If you hitch a ride with me,
I must tell you the truth:
I only pretend to write
about the universe.
What I am really writing about
is my own heart.
The Land Takes My Picture
I turn toward the land
to see myself with eyes
of shade and water, muscle borne
on the shoulders
of the hills,
fleshy soil stretching
over magma like my own skin
stretches over the fossil gossip
in my bones, the lava
of my heart,
with its luna-moon rising
over a covey of leaf and bough--
and one wild tree
whose fruit wishes me well—
would always love me
if I let it.
Folklorist Madronna Holden’s retirement from university teaching has given her the opportunity to concentrate on her poetry. In the last two years, over forty of her poems have appeared in Equinox Poetry and Prose, The Cold Mountain Review, About Place, Leaping Clear, Windfall, Clackamas Literary Review, Slippery Elm Literary Journal, and many others. Previously, she won the Pacifica Prize for poetry two times, and the community production of her poetry drama, The Descent of Inanna, was the subject of a special aired on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
David Wolfersberger and his paintings are summer friends, sometimes seen walking the land as they feel and remember it and want it to be again, before fences, where people live and care for the earth and each other. Watercolors he painted on his 3500-mile solo bicycle tour of the West Coast have appeared or are forthcoming in conjunction with Madronna Holden’s poems in Cold Mountain Review, About Place, Leaping Clear, Slippery Elm Literary Review, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere.