John Poch

God knows the law of life is death, and you can feel it in your warbler neck, your river-quick high stick wrist at the end of day. But the trophies: a goldfinch tearing up a pink thistle, a magpie dipping her wing tips in a white cloud, an ouzel barreling hip-high upstream with a warning. You wish you had a river. To make a river, it takes some mountains. Some rain to watershed. You wish you had a steady meadow and pink thistles bobbing at the border for your horizons, pale robins bouncing their good postures in the spruce shadows. Instead, the law of life comes for you like three men and a car. In your dreams, you win them over with your dreams: a goldfinch tearing up a pink thistle. A magpie so slow she knows how to keep death at bay, she takes her time with argument and hides her royal blue in black. Shy as a blue grouse, nevertheless God doesn’t forget his green mountains. You wish you had a river.

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience? If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man: a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard. Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen, no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water. Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas, a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.

January. I pluck it, this feather flapping in the high mesquite only head-high, caught by the down, iridescent, turkey. Another feather hugging the ditch along the fence line and another... A coyote somewhere naps happy, grinning like the feather evolved from a leaf. What luck. Clouds lift above the field as if to swallow my eye into hunger. Good hunger. The greatest eye must behold me like an ember dropped into a finch nest, and I smoke at the mouth like a gun dreaming in a safe of a war it can win by virtue of its praise. I have lost the killer phrase I concocted on my country walk with the feather in my pocket. I cock it.

She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact: there’s only so much you can do with friction and an intentional hand before the hand burns. The sound that scissors make in a child’s hand while crunching construction paper aches when she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style, that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk. Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that. We come down from bunk beds. We come down from the funky reds and yellows of the spring’s summer tanager gone in fall. We fail to see the most vivid birds high in the trees on the other side of leaves. Where did those sad seeds come from or how take root? Her departure spun out of some samara down into a maple shadow that shadows well into night’s sweet syrup. O host, we don’t know the words for this country, and this country pretends we have no knife, no guns in the bedroom, no large car for escaping or crashing over hard hillsides or into houses. We stuff our faces, blank as pills, with pills. No one wants to open that book, but it’s a book.