Tag: foothills

Axis Mundi

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

It takes a while for the birds
to land, though one or two
blue sentries are always
on the low tumuli of piñon:
scrub-jays sensitive to my morning feet
the creaking door
the crackling of the seed bag or
the soft clank of the bucket’s
handle on the tub

Sound carries here
in sagebrush-juniper
above the valley floor
a whisper half a mile along
our rutted dirt might as well
be whispered in the yurt

and so I fill the feeder knowing
the unknown wild is watching
our Clark’s Nutcracker or the jays
and juncos dropping
from the Sangres in the fall

dropping from the foothills
with the usual messages
about time gone
and smaller days

I tip out empty husks and peanut shells
from the hanging wood and wire
of the little platform

there’s already shuffling deep
in the otherworld of the bough
yet who could tell?
they’re still too liminal for me

ghost birds have started their
lazy, patient circling around my head
weaving a perimeter of sound
Pinyon Jays with their uncanny bleating
and the whistling of Mourning Doves

though all there is to see
is Sis Naajiní on the far horizon
catching the eastern light now
holding up the sky

our white shell mountain
the one initiates climbed
to spend the night in shuddering cold
greeting the early heavens
with an outstretched hand
to feed the gods
humanity

Bread

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

We walk out for the view,
a mug of Irish tea and the paper,
to celebrate the old miracles:
the crust of the Hogback, red as brick,
even with the weather coming in,
its gnarled ridges alongside the new grass,
the gun-blue lake
filling and emptying.

Heat and water and milled earth
did this landscape’s cooking.
You weren’t thinking of them
when you baked this morning,
mixing seed and almond flour,
made a well and poured the liquid in,
paid no attention to the other magic —
that’s a poet’s job:
those massive ridges buckling in the fire,
or the snowmelt topping up
the bowl of the reservoir
they submerged a whole town for,
drowned the trees
and the everyday miracles of memories /
a weathered sign
is all that’s left of Stout.

Your bread sits by the window, cooling,
beaten and belching,
and breathing out.

Winter Storm Warning

~ Kat Couch ~ 2 Comments

The Ides of March and the week after,
this great hinge of the seasons,
as though checking the mail,
I’m on my hands and knees,
the sun on my back and the windless
grace of Colorado morning,
measuring the daffodil shoots:
a few inches high now,
but several new,
a full twenty or so to follow.

The daybreak chorus of house finches,
chickadees, and dark-eyed juncos,
like the approaching hum
of day visitors to the park,
motorcycle boys along the dams,
swells almost imperceptibly.

We spent the whole of winter waiting
and now the stork’s bill is here,
the dandelion’s rugged rosette /
they’ll overtake us soon,
too many images to catch — we might as well
gather all the falling snow.

And the weather report says it’s coming.
The wind picks up by five,
the brooding cloud and then
the pale, insidious skin of the sky
above the foothills,
the coughing of the pines
in the depth of the night.
Eight inches, they say. Maybe more.
Shelter in place, avoid travel,
stay off the interstate.

I take up my place
at the south window, then,
where I can see the daffodils
before the snow comes and covers
their height three or four times deep.
There they’ll sit, jacketed with cold,
quiet as death, their green mouths
smug and smiling.

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.