Five Poems

James Braziel

Ditty

In the creek swiftly, the eyes of a schoolgirl dancing,
her scarf free to rudder her body through the March
wind. What a day for kites, for limbs to break and fly
up, up, the bark peeling in curls like lost feathers from
a darting swallow, the whole sky opening in blue, in silence.

The wind talking? It is a trick of force, stopped by the
stone pillars at the river, the boles sloping down the banks.
Only the girl seems affected, skipping and turning,
whistling a ditty the wind overtakes with its speech,
sends up—a whisper for the burning sun.

Lonely Sky

Lonely sky, breaking with the anticipation of snow,
the frozen ground and trees tense, on alert
for the drifts, drifting down—the scene becomes
peaceful then, the earth remade, full of wet-white,
a covering as cottoned as the sky. For now
bicycles cling motionless to rails, gutter drains
open to the ground with nothing
but the March grass pointing sharply
to clouds moving in.

Gray

Old corner post, staring out at the field,
keeping together arms of fence, watching
and holding in rain, sun, clouds like these
overtaking March with wild geese returning,
the beginning of grasses that will become
a thick patch of blue-jade, then brown wisps, dry
for the cutting, the geese going out again—
autumn—leaves stirring past the barbed wires,
blankets of ice in winter. This sentry landlocked
to the earth, refusing to give to the wind,
holding this corner of pasture forever.

March

March has a way of leaving everything childless:
branches without leaves, a sky unsettled,
an earth without blooms for us
to wander through, house to car
uncertain that these directions
are taking us where we want to go.

I hear crying in the fierce wind, pieces of
snow trying to make a patch on the ground.
Wandering, wandering—that is what is left
to us until the sun comes closer and the wind
consents, wandering and staring back
at the cries we heard or thought we heard,
that were ours maybe, a child with footsteps
perishing in the snow.

Slipping

We split the tree into firewood, loaded them
into the back of the truck and took them home
to dry for winter. For a week that summer we sawed
oaks and black gums in the forest. I remember walking
across the downed boles, balancing, pretending that a gorge
was below, an empty space taken from the earth, ready
to take me as well. I was ready to fall, to feel the crush
of a hard earth breaking me bone by bone into the smallest pieces
before my father’s eyes. He would gather me up then,
take me home for winter and build me into fires to keep us warm.
Slowly through a season I would turn into coal, into ash, be gone.
The soft mud and moss were an illusion—
the sharp gorge as real as the nervous splintering of my legs
under saw and bone. Only when my father called me back
to work did the empty space disappear and my hands
become full again of pieces of wet oak, no longer
grabbing at invisible trunks of air to keep me
from wanting and falling.