JOAN CAROL BIRD - POEMS

Joan Carol Bird is an emerging poet living in the Arizona White Mountains with her husband and their four cats. She has been a high school English teacher and is the author of the short story collections "Holy Innocents and Other Stories," "Cat Circus," "Nightmare and Nostalgia," and "Annie Falcon." 

 Summer Dance

​                                           Tantalizing flower--
                                                                        bloom without promise.
                                                This dance is graceful
                                                                                    brief.
                                                Fragile fiction
                                                                        full of convention
                                                            on a sweltering night.
                                                Solitary
                                                            intimate encounter
                                                            hasty shallow
                                                                                    desultory
                                                                        wistful
                                                                                    eloquent.
                                                An embrace
                                                                        relax
                                                            yield--
                                                                                    relinquish.
                                                The music always ends before
                                                            one is ready.

 

Acequia Madre
For Lynn
​

                                         Reflections of a dying sun
                                                             rust savage cliffs.
                                                In the West
                                                            the earth will sleep again.
                                    You nurture
                                                fair garden flowers.
                                                            Wild lavender strains flourish
                                                                        beyond the broken      
                                                                                    adobe wall.
                                    Within clay constraints
                                                (the human plight)
                                                delicate, elegant features prevail.
                                                            Steel-gray eyes pause
                                                                        fixed and distant.
                                    Warm summer winds stir.
                                                The Acequia Madre presses on--
                                                You tend, gently, children
                                                                        defying protection
                                                                        as you turn your heedful gaze
                                                            from the old, ambivalent, fading
                                                light.
 

 

That Which I Am
​Peru

The curator lingers
            on monastery steps--
restoration renders four
fanciful tourists
                                    fortunate voyeurs
                                                in this sixteenth-century cloister.
Besides the hermit
            all life here is for the moment banished.
Our monk ushers us
                        from one macabre chamber
                                    to another
                        locking ghostly elements in place
                                    behind us.
Cedar wood reliefs of martyred saints
            encircle an ornate choir
                         while catacombs below the grate
                                    insist we coexist with specters.
In one secluded sepulcher where
            consolidated bones promiscuously tangle
                        the sign above the sealed door proclaims
                                    Lo que eres fui
                                    Lo que soy seras.
Near a fountain in the courtyard, eclipsed in dusk
              Inca eyes flash. The old man is
                        Preternatural. Pale with the lack of light
                                    and like his ancestor
an artist in his own right.
                                    He captures us with studied care
                                               in a snapshot
                                               a candid still-life.
                We freeze, uneasy in the frame
                                                                 under his keen, judgmental glare.
At the entrance and exit
            before we ascend to Cusco streets
            we pause beneath The Last Judgment:
                        oil on canvas
                                     a vision of heaven and hell
                                    where an Inca artist has set himself
                                                in full ceremonial headdress
                                                            between rapture and torment.
            The face of every other painted soul
                                    tortured or exulted
                                                suggests an ecclesiastic
                                    who lived and died within these walls.
Years later
            trapped on emulsion
                        overexposed
                                I tuck the faded photo in my book and shudder
                                at our own Last Judgement:
                                                 Lo que eres fui
                                                 Lo que soy seras.

Two Minutes of Darkness
Solar Eclipse
Madras, Oregon
​

                        Bold, brash, brave
                                                confident and undeterred
                                                            by demons, dragons
                                                                                    giant wolves
                                                                                    that gobble up the sun.
                                    Daredevils don’t dodge
                                                angry gods
                                                            harbingers of plague
                                                                        or oracles of doom.
 
                                    We zigzag from Seattle
                                                on a weaving two-lane drive
                                                            and end on drought-dry Madras turf
                                                bone tired, swathed in capes
                                                                        under clear high skies
                                                                                    and blinking desert stars.
                                    Mid-morning, campers peer
                                                through a neighbor’s high-tech scope.
                                                            Amity with strangers grows.
                                                            Zealots from around the globe
                                                                        are here for a magic show--
                                                                                    the total eclipse of the sun.
 
                                    Anticipation swells
                                                 as shadow consumes
                                                            our blazing solar disc.
                                                Bailey’s beads, slivers of flare
                                                            bubble and broil on a lunar limb.
                                    The flaming diamond ring goes slack.
                                                Shadow cloaks the forenoon earth
                                                            cold bites, and the night sky
                                                                        reigns in the dead of day.
                                   
                                    And then a spirit eye appears
                                                colossal and compelling
                                                            infinite, omnipotent.
                                                The rocky landscape of the moon
                                                            throbs like a vast black pupil.
                                                The corona, a sclera
                                                            radiates ribbons of plasma.
                                                                        Charged particles flow
                                                                                    in twirls and tracks.
                                                Spellbinding, this holy sight
                                                            too regal to resist.
                                    Mind without mind
                                                the temporal world dissolves.
                                                           
                                    A trance, a daze, a dream:
                                               
                                                Jung’s sickbed vision
                                                            yin and yang in a mystical marriage
                                                                        of perfect balance.
                                                Krishnamurti, soul-infused
                                                            with healing glow
                                                                        uninvited and unsought.
                                                William James, high on nitrous
                                                            absorbing streams of opposites
                                                                        no sober soul can know.
                                                Watts, weightless before a fire.
 
                                                 Like love-struck Romeo
                                                            I am not any where.
 
                                                For me
                                                            two minutes of darkness are
                                                                        music without sound
                                                                        light without sight
                                                                        everything and nothing--
                                                                                    Creation’s wink and nod
                                                                                    a subtle glimpse of God.
 

Expat Hermosillo
​

​                        His eyes, the washed tincture of wind
                                                feral and savage, weigh the prospects.
                                    He alights, fraught and greedy
                                                between parked cars
                                                                        and gasoline pumps
                                                            ravenously rummaging Sonoran trash
                                                                        sparse refuse
                                                                                    in desperate times.
                                    Somebody’s bedeviled
                                                            golden-haired child
                                                            lives on what others throw away.
                                                Discarded, damaged, derelict
                                                (somebody’s bitter regret)
                                                            his threadbare Texas tee
                                                                            the color of scorched earth.
                                    I cautiously approach
                                                this wounded, wolfish teen
                                                who warily accepts the traces of my lunch
                                                            the balance of a mean meal
                                                                        a paltry offering.
                                                Mute, afraid, he scuttles from the scene.
                                    I watch him wander off and wonder
                                                what brings this broken
                                                third-world American
                                                            to the land of the poor
                                                                        where all around
                                                                                    blue thatched mountains
                                                                                    and a burning desert sky
                                                                                                swallow his name.