Tag: Colorado poets

I’m Not Going to Say This Twice (but if I do, I’m going to add more birds)

~ Kat Couch

Be sure in your art.
By all means be tapped out, hard up,
on-your-beam-ends poor if you are,
but when you dance,
dance mansions, parks, chestnut trees
with pale pyramid flowers.
Flex an arm: banknotes
flutter from your fingers
like swallows. Mint motion.

Even your journals grant
principalities to princes.
The huge coffered door of your hall
bends and groans with the press
of secretaries and goatherds
clutching spice boxes,
ranch hands with gold watches,
bluebird navies, teak-timbered ships.
Go out to the harbor this morning
and swing your ideas against
their sides. Send them on their way.

Be nervous if you must,
flop-sweat stopped
like a drowned bottle,
but your hands when they draw,
draw water from rock —
white pelicans,
the most self-absorbed things in the sky,
wheel and rest at your feet,
canyons open,
the horizon duplicates itself
infinitely,
dark for the pearls of stars.

Lack faith if you do,
but your voice, when you sing along,
peals from Spanish mission towers,
beams creak with the weight of bells,
dun valleys fill and green,
dwarf pines whistle and whisper.
Keep your head down:
vesper sparrows have made a nest
in your faithless hair.

It has always been that way.
The monks have gathered for Matins
and the abbot is on the stair.
He has your arms and eyes, your hands.
And the old voice —
the one we put together
from sewn leather, trail dust,
sage, salt, wind whipped,
like a prayer —
lifts, hums, moves
the whole goddamn building
from the rafters to the crypt.

Hummingbirds

~ Kat Couch

It helps if you don’t overthink migration,
nor anything else when it comes to moving:
how imperceptibly the angle of the sun
changes in late July in Saanich, on Saltspring Island.

If it were time to go
you’d have the creeping feeling
the meeting is in another room,
an anxious dream, departmental reports,
you without pants, an inappropriate hard-on.
Everyone else is leaving, you’re still in the
break room with half a bad sandwich,
cooling coffee, sugar on your breath,
the tides, you realize, pale as pupae.

There seem to be fewer now, at the feeder.
They still collect, tail-end of August,
Rufous young, fighters, each one a small
persimmon, turned oaks, autumnal fruit,
a tubular pulse.

I read somewhere hummingbirds beat their
wings ninety times a second, faster when
they’re infatuated, their metabolisms
gyroscopes, so blindingly quick we seem
never to move, eerie, plaster-still.
Though /
the meteorologists are weeping millibars,
warm water, the flood’s ransacking
Green Mountain and the gurgling Toe River,
minutes of the summer’s summit drying
the spider legs that were Lake Mead.

They envy our immobility, these traveling
birds, the dedication we have to our craft,
even our trigger fingers fixed, while
around their fragile heads beats
the beautiful ruin of the evening.

The Shrine of the Stations of the Cross

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

If the idea was for us to suffer,
just a little, as he suffered,
they failed.
The day is too good:
a bluebird Saturday in September,
a boy is fixing an old pump,
a silver-haired couple snaps
pictures on the steep steps to the shrine.
A cool breeze visits
from the wild horse mesa;
we have our thermos of gas station coffee,
and our water bottles.

The pain is below:
the small high desert town of San Luis,
where every other child is poor,
and on this sixth day of Sukkot,
the main street is bare,
everyone in his wilderness.

But still, along the way,
on loose dirt the color of leather,
on square sandstone plinths,
remarkable bronzes of Jesus
in that final hour,
enough to counter the children gone,
the closed shop.
So the lesson misses its mark in beauty.
In our homespun, woven in,
someone has stitched freshwater pearls,
irregular pearls our hands finger absently
on the wall of the dry well.

In the crowd, a friend writes,
I feel my loneliness embrace me.

He is waiting to be rescued,
like the old street
with its stubborn murals,
like our own interrupted progress,
confused, doubting,
given up,
occasionally blessed.

When we get to the shrine
there are no graces
but only things.
No salvation but the bees
in the chapel dome, whispering;
the rooks on the whitewash.
No hereafter but the rasp
of heavy timber on the hand
and the iron nail.
Nothing in our loneliness to know,
nothing new, except the tongue
of upslope wind from San Luis,
the mute crowd,
and the view.

Air National Guard

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?” —Kazuo Ishiguro

If you want to be a pilot,
grow up in a small town
where they answer the phone
at the auto parts store
with a loud “Yell-ow!”

And at the hair salon the talk
is neighbors and their little angels:
“When she sleeps we put it up in braids?
It’s got such a beautiful natural wave,
don’t you think?”

The stylists heckle, warming up.
“Hey! You took pictures with my phone!”
“What kind of insulting nickname can I give you?
Wait! Oh, hi Lola.”
“Hello. Hi.”
“How about Lolita? Muffin?”
“Do I look like a bran muffin to you?”
“Oh, you’ve been Muffin for years.
You have the coloring of a bran muffin.”
“It’s better than Lennie. We call Sam Lennie.
From Mice and Men.”
No, Lenny Kravitz! Because of the piercing stuff.”

“Boys, you coming back? We got a perm special.”
I wave it away, the girls from Central laughing.

Lunchtime, we’re on the bypass
by the base parkway,
me and Blake, him with a Double Deluxe
and me just with the fries,
watching a T-41 trying to land
in a cross-wind.
“You could kill yourself in one of those things,”
he gets the words out, chewing,
wiping his chin.
And I say, yes.
Yes. You could.

Fetching Lili’s Ashes

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

A bill from the urgent care center
in Mesa, Arizona,
is addressed to Lisa Steinhoff,
whoever she was:
no one called Steinhoff lives
on Painted Rock Trail today.
I lean over the console of the truck,
write “Not at this address!”,
and slip it in the outgoing mail.

Ten days ago Saturday
we put our Russian Blue down,
after midnight, bundling her crate
into the Subaru for the long drive,
to the only open vet, far out of town.
I sweet-talked her, our little girl
(though in people years
she was sixty-four, or sixty-five).

But repeating the sad drive again,
leaving the clinic again,
this time in full sun June
I carry the box with her ashes
to the car, gently, like a newborn,
cradling the deep blue bag,
the ribboned sleeve from the crematorium.

I half expected to lift the lid
for her last lesson of dust,
but the box is fastened shut:
Spanish cedar, corners rounded,
joints seamless, sweetly smelling
in the unseasonable heat.

And on the forty-mile route back north
despite myself, knowing she is not her body,
not at this address,
I talk to the cedar box,
warm in the cab of the truck
warm as her head was in the moment before,
her ears then, like old carpet,
ragged with age.

Music Box

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

A girl in Odessa is holding a candle,
one of those showy candles
topped with a brass carousel
from which hang
a ring of brass stars.
It’s my favorite candle, she says,
because when the heat rises,
the metal spins, the stars dance.
See? It’s already half gone, the
glass cup of candle half empty.

She is trying to remember
the English words for a music box,
but she only knows the Russian.
It’s all she speaks well.
A Russian Ukrainian, waiting for
the bombs.

She blows against the carousel,
unwilling to light it.
She is trying to distract herself,
trying to distract us.
Музыкальная шкатулка, she repeats,
frustrated, and the words
come out of her mouth like silk.
Muzykal’naya shkatulka
A casket? she guesses.
They are caskets that sing a melody.
Caskets that sing a melody.

She fingers the candle.
One day we will light it together,
she says. For now, though.
The present isn’t worth much:
distraction, the need to connect,
so you can drop fear off,
like a child at daycare.
But the future!
when we can light the candle,
and spin the stars on ribbons of heat,
each circus breath a memory:
a casket,
rows of caskets,
each with a melody.

Saddle Ridge

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Two boys ride their bikes
from one corner to another across the north field.
The realtor had told us a local church owned the land.
It’ll never be built on, she promised.
And at least for now it hasn’t been: a vacant rag-and-bone lot,
God-made for weekend racing.

The boys are maybe ten…twelve?
They fly off the field too fast to compare.
Nothing in their lives will ever again be this uncomplicated —
the gentle slope of it, the trail rubbed to hardtack,
the blood oath company of boys,
and down the block, a pirate map of streets
with names like Campfire, Horse Soldier, Medicine Man.
Familiar home-ended streets.

Years from now, too many years to see,
when they’re a little worn themselves,
and divorced in one way or another from their deep contentment,
this will seem like saving,
a possible grace.
Mild October, the air whistling and racing,
and their sharp shouting rising
like seagulls on a sunlit sea.