It began with an audacious
October. The sky blazed
and three apple trees blew red
like a warning
over the pasture fence.
By November, the brick walk
was littered with the clatter
of oak, sycamore, ash
and behind the old barn,
the garden darkened
with the allure of gray weeds
and shiftlessness.
It is white now and winter.
The black dog buries her bone
and cold gathers in the farm house,
the hasp rattles, ruminates.
In the kitchen, I sit by the wood fire
with my dead father.
He polishes his shoes—
the ones he bought
when I was a child, five
pairs, half price, genuine
leather.
He’s lined them up
like winter acorns.
Before I go, I want to be a Joni Mitchell song.
I want to knock you back on the bed,
your awe staring at the ceiling,
your breath almost gone.
I want to lasso you in barbed wire
or capture you in a silken net and tack you
like a butterfly to a velvet board.
I want to lay open your wings.
You will love all things gorgeous
and tragic and flawed.
You will know you are not alone.
I will know I am a poet.
On the five-hundred-acre ranch,
my husband wears his cowboy hat
as he walks our dog to the barn
under smothering blue, high blue,
radiant blue, boundless blue.
On television, thirty thousand fans
in Wrigley Field, Harry Carey,
the seventh inning stretch,
the sun-stroked shirtless bleacher bums
beyond the green diamond.
Our Chicago car is parked
not far from Wrigley Field
in the lot of the Catholic Abbey.
We early exit. We fast walk to beat the crowd.
“Too many people,” I say. “Too many.”
We have to cross the Rio Puerco in our pickup
to get to the hard road, fifteen minutes,
and fifteen minutes more to the women’s restroom
that boasts that poster of Georgia O’Keefe
on the back of somebody,
on the back of a Harley,
her head cranked in reverse
with a face of happy in the desert, of in love
with this edgeless maze of empty
and the dead that grow needles, spindles, spikes, rocks,
the local enchilada.
Red chile, Green chile.
It doesn’t matter.
My belly burns.
My city roots combust.
My smile is a mouthful
of rocks.
was born in small-town Illinois. After years of taking trips on horseback, she took
a more radical ride, leaving Chicago and her profession as a licensed clinical social
worker for life on a remote ranch in northern New Mexico. It was then that poetry
entered her life in earnest. In her living room, she has a large piano which she
loves, but she doesn’t play it anymore, not after discovering poetry. Her
poems appear in Cold Mountain Review and Willow Springs, and she
has a poem forthcoming in Briar Cliff Review. Deason now lives and writes
in Santa Fe.