Category: Seasons

Camera

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Every morning, as I go out,
I catch sight of my Nikon
on the hallway dresser
where I have deliberately left it,
charged with promise,
the magic lantern of schoolkids’ stories —
knowing that if I don’t take it
I’m sure to see something astonishing
and only have these dubious words.

I am always right:
the cones of the blue spruce
in the late winter light
drape on the top branches
like streetseller wares, plumbed fruit
hanging from his shoulders.
Or along the base
of our eastern slope,
where stubborn white pelts of snow
depress the prairie grass,
the veins of deer tracks
trickle out and finger.

I take the camera, then,
convinced that I have made
the whole world suddenly dull.
And I am always right:
what I saw in the spruce
I couldn’t tell you,
the tired interminable drupe of the bough /
not at all like vulture wings,
or the ratcatcher swinging
from a shoulder yoke, by their tails,
this late winter catch of cone.
How the deer are gone again,
and left us the mundane definition
of their feet, more loss
than lotuses.

Two winter tanka

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

Laramie Foothills:
the Soapstone Prairie bison
shift in the long grass,
February snow melted,
morning sun on Red Mountain.

Almost midnight now.
Orion has circled south,
the Great Bear dances
on his tail in the northeast:
late winter on the high plains.

Doing some filing. Finding snippets of verse on half-sheets. Finish or toss? These were saved from the recycling bin by the fact that they must have been written a few years back but at just this time of the season. They have a gratifying tactile quality, like coins pressed in clay.

Plough Monday (Mummers’ Dance)

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

She doesn’t understand their language,
so they dance
in naked feet and leather boots,
hooded and robed, in cotton shirts
or bare-chested, with fire sticks
and petals on their faces.

Alone, in packs of five or six,
walking widdershins,
fluttering hands
like the wings of rock doves,
dancing poetry in the world of acts.

And it may be that once she did understand.
Eons past, our guttural sounds had sense:
she formed our throats, whittled bone,
the small muscles of our voices /
but time passed.
She lost interest.

So now they jig-step like jesters
at the heart and edges of power,
on the all-consuming
blind and toothless crone.
Throats dry,
with a finger,
they inscribe on her broad, flat palm
the word for water.

I have good days and bad days

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

On the bad days the cataract moon,
the full hunter’s moon, splinters in the sky;
footstep pieces rain into the atmosphere.
I am swimming in the Great Lakes
among the decomposing bodies of pigs,
flip-flops, and plastic wallets.
Our neighbor has caught fire
walking to the mailbox
and flakes of his kindling skin
drift up the hill like paper.
The black pine off the deck aches
for the touch of finches and flickers —
its twin is already gone
heart broken, heart broken,
and the streambed of the intermittent stream
has given up trying to remember
the feel of water.
The tv plays its only scene:
the thin-boned dad rocking on the curb,
his eyes like socket wrenches, saying
we lost everything.

On the good days it is like
this late November snow / so still
you can hear across Well Gulch
the rustle of that unselfconscious thrush
regular as the earth contracting in the sun.
He has fallen asleep now,
tired in his abundance.

I wear my old wool hat to get the mail.
Melinda, the post girl, is still down the block,
trembling in her cappuccino-colored Jeep,
clapping her hands for blood,
and so I wait,
boots squeaking in the drift
below the cottonwood.

Beach Break

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Maybe they think
because you stare,
because you’ve chosen the dullest gear:
a charcoal t-shirt and matching backpack —
the rest, slate-ash grays,
that you live alone in a small shuttered room,
goth-nihilist,
with a collection of girlie rags
and biker monthlies
from the 7-Eleven across the alley
— who knows?
maybe the pack itself is bad-ass,
where it slumps dangerously
on your shoulders,
the skateboard only pretending
to be a perch /
but in some square’s fearful fantasy
quickly spun up into the hands,
dropped ready at your feet
when the shooting is done,
when the bright bodies
of sunbathers
bleed into the sand.

But what they don’t see
are the d(-_-)b
upside-down, playing Strauss,
the dazed, goofy smile,
how on your first day off in a while
the lake with its boats and cascading laughter
elevates you as well
into the heady weekend air;
what they don’t see
is that in the jungle of your beach,
in its Amazonian gaiety,
among the bathing suits with their
parrot dances and birds of paradise,
the dull gray bird is king:
he only needs to sit here
in their awkward,
sidelong glances.

Telephone

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

The sun sets in a muddled bank of cloud,
the evening falling fast on Labor Day.
Five of us around the table:
a Brewer’s blackbird, a jack pine,
a stone, and Emily and me.

We served red berries and a trout,
and when the dishes were all put away
we played that old game of Telephone,
where you whisper a few words
in your neighbor’s ear
and they pass along to theirs
what they believed they heard.

Blackbird, I said,
All I have to lend is meager light.

He landed weightless on the stone,
repeating: Dark or day we rise in eager flight.

The stone, stone-deaf, in a low voice
to the tree: Snow numbs, but see,
on the hillside how it glistens!

And the pine, a metaphysical sort,
passed along: Wind hums, sit with me
and feel her kisses.

The message came to Emily
who turned and touched my face:
But when it comes, she said
the landscape listens.

Narcissus pseudonarcissus

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Bell narcissus, bobbing on the swell of wind
that licks up the foothills, trumpets filled,
gulping lungfuls of the upslope morning.
Springing mute-lipped, one March day bowed with snow,
the next, by their deep pneumatic will, upright,
flexing, boxing air.

Still, unstill cornets who neither sing nor stop.
Soundless, December’s cellared children,
together tethered to unspeaking kin,
hand on mouth should someone hear, speaking
only through their skin.

What we know of yellow is extracted,
emetic, from their frayed and furrowed flutes.
Use this caustic color with care, she warns:
Spring brings out its fighters first, those with a thirst
for struggle. Picture tinctured spirit, too strong
for pretty idling.

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