Some others standing
about like chessmen
in stalemate. Foothills
where all the campers’
litter flocks
become a high mantle
of gulls. Skies gray
scuttled battleship.
Wane of spindrift,
driftwood the busted
kneecaps of foul gods.
A bottle washed
ashore, the message
inside clear: don’t go,
wait right here.
THIS UNACCOUNTABLE MOOD
Fitful wind harangues the hillside it loved once.
Orchard bemoans its openhanded ways, wants
all its apples and best years back. Much on
the mind in this squally twilight. My off-
leash hound because he can chooses
indolence, lags behind. Interstate unseen
but lurking, a distant flute into the earth,
immeasurably long. Trucks pachydermatous
out there. Haulage gravel. Destination some
gray and brackish elsewhere that needs fill.
I second-guess earlier moods, my trusted
companion meanwhile gone cold equivocal
beside me, though for reasons only a twitching
snout can articulate. Windfall here anatomize
in the sparrow-high cheatgrass, sweet-stink
cloying as a carnival’s sugar-dusted
midway. I refuse my natural urge to tally,
to audit, or otherwise diminish every lungful
of this late day redolence, accountant
of the air between jobs that I am.
STALLED TRAINS AT PADDOCK
Ore-humped hopper cars like serpents coiled and skulking whenever the Paddock Street gates stuck. Our sunup clothes ashy as ever and lunch pails metallic as tang the foundry cindered into local flavors. What waned and vanished we saw coming for miles. Where were the mothers we knew as ours? Absent, yet cinched to us like sallow cloth over naked tribal shame. Knuckles raw with wailing, your father ground stars. Mine whizzed through porch lattice into any rain. Their rightful places twigged by dim Paddock taverns. Hard rooms upstairs, some windows never painted shut. Those ledges rain-mottled, pigeon-tarred, retched from morning, noon, and night.
LAST DAY TOGETHER
1.
All day hums,
the out-of-tune
passersby.
They mean well
enough, and make
the sky
up where
quiet clouds are
a refuge.
No rain. Or
rain, but
lucky: only after
errands
which include
stuffing our faces.
Dear bistro.
2.
Love is
only love
if you can’t keep it
down. So you say
you’ll get
the check if
I’ll take
the umbrella.
On the way home
you explain—
if I understand
correctly.
3.
Such strange
obsidian
weather, or
murder of crows.
Clouds
made of sea,
islands of cloud,
my hand
made of small bones
digging
around your
heart ablaze.
This one last
firebreak.
Photo by Jayne Harris on Unsplash.
Jon Ballard
Jon Ballard is a Michigan-based poet whose work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Flint Hills Review, New Plains Review, Broadsided, San Pedro River Review, and DMQ Review, among many others. He is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Possible Lives (Kelsay Press, 2020) and a novel, Year of the Poets (Loose Leaves Publishing, 2014). Find him on his Website.