Slow Freight
A coal train winds
its way between seasons.
Summer fades
into the cottonwoods
beneath a ruin on the cliffs
six hundred autumns empty,
past an eagle’s nest
with fledglings gone,
and one river deep
into the ground.
Water rumbles on its bed
and at each steep curve
the silent rocks absorb
a drawn out screech
of steel.
A City Calendar
One mile west of the museum
displaying ancient artifacts
is the bus stop shelter
where the descendants of those who crafted them
spend the summer days
sipping beer. Here are pigeons in the palm trees,
kestrels on the wire,
and in winter the hawk outside its range
perches in the tallest eucalyptus. A short walk away
is the emergency room
with a television burning images
of fast cars into the brains
of patients all year. Across the street
a shopping cart has not been moved since the monsoon
when someone gave up pushing it
and left the paperback
half read, the pack of cigarettes half smoked,
and a plastic sheet
folded beside the stars
and faded stripes. To the south
is the library
where the homeless in all seasons
rest from hauling garbage bags.
A week from Halloween
flags hang in the residential streets
beside the faces of ghosts
with the compost smell rising
from the seeds of winter lawns. We stay green
from Thanksgiving to spring, bury the months as they pass
beneath freeways so as always to live
for the future with the immigrants on Central
standing in line, still entering the country
with no border in view, counting the days
until the next holiday sale.
Western Skies
Early morning our sky is powder,
then it hardens into a shell
holding down the heat,
and finally it burns
away as another cowboy sunset
reflecting in the tall glass buildings
where air bites through the skin.
The oldest inhabitants of Phoenix
remember when a fan
blew through wet linens
to keep them cool. The small town
of their childhood years
lies under this one, built one house
at a time with opium
in the Chinese den and stars
they could count. They have survived
along with the lizards
who found refuge in their gardens
and the spiders
marked with an hourglass.
They have fed a thousand hummingbirds
and watched their city grow
on televisions they can’t turn off,
still waiting to see the sky
as the last part of the desert
to disappear.
David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several
years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. He enjoys listening to very old music, birding,
and hiking in the Arizona landscape. Along with poems in magazines, he has a list of chapbook
publications with Places You Can’t Reach (Pudding House Publications, 2006) being the latest,
and recent books: A Normal Day Amazes Us (Kings Estate Press, 2003), Return to Waking Life
(Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2004), and Waiting for the Quetzal (March Street Press, 2006).
Email: David Chorlton
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