Both Portraits (Excerpt)
In his bleary memory she poses
like an immaculate mannequin,
her eyes pimentos, joints frozen
in a gesture he's grown to know.
Loss is like a bluebottle fly
buzzing around in a mug of bourbon.
She'll come back. Any minute,
he keeps telling himself.
. . .
Inspiration (Excerpt)
Not far from where a coyote led me
over the sparsely timbered hillside,
I found a feather held in the sagebrush
flanking an abandoned logging road.
I knew the pattern, its bars of tan
almost the color of parchment
or more like that coyote's pelt actually.
The feather of a great barred owl.
You could say the darker, narrower
. . .
Your Life As Found In A Toolbox (Excerpt)
Everything necessary to maintain
every foundation ever built so far
is found simply by fondling the latch,
easy as recalling a less-than-fond past,
and then by handling each orderly tray
of tools too simple to call hand tools:
a stick of chalk meant for marking
the measure of almost anything
from concrete to an assortment
of planks sorted out as useless;
that yellow Stanley measuring tape
used to measure what used to matter;
and one lead stone to plumb the line,
much like a fisherman's sinker or fob,
and gauge the point of vanishing.
. . .
- Allen Braden
