Bobbi Buchanan

Freak of Nature

She is more like a lover than a mother to me.

I get drunk on her love

            potion of creek and crickets,

get high on her honeysuckle.

She serenades me with the thrum of the wood thrush,

            the rattle-hiss of summer cicadas,

lures me into a cool copse of cedars

            a constellation of lightning bugs—

                        Musca, Lyra, Indus—

            on the inky canvas of night

with her strange music, her siren song.

She reminds me, I am forty percent daisy,

            rose hips, the moon

flower that moves

            the winged goddess.

I am Iris, the myth and the flower.

She teaches me the art of seduction

shows me the loveliness of transformation

            how the lime-green leaves of April

                          give way to richer shades of May,

            how fleabane blooms, shakes her hair out,

                          dares me to feel her feathery rays,

                          then fades and shrinks, folds

                                        back into earth.

back to the blackness of unconsciousness,

how everything dies

for winter.

She draws me to that dark season

            the beautiful death—

                        the plum of ash leaves and fiery sumac,

                        the cottonwoods shedding their love.

She enchants me with moonglow on a snowy grove

so that I want to be kissed, to be remembered in that light

                            Iris, the lover, the legend, the flower,

                            the scabby-kneed girl with a boy's name.

She beckons me to lie down in a field of timothy,

            golden galaxy of summer after summer after summer

to die under the inky canvas of night

            in the peace and stillness of white woods

            under a constellation of lightning bugs.

She sends the wood thrush with his swooping flute

            to take me deeper into the mystery

            to implore me to

                          listen

                          listen

                          listen

before the world I thought I wanted slips away.

The Better Angel

Wake up dope sick at the county

jail, but at least wake up.

Remember your babies, brighter now.

Before bruised strobes and sirens

wailing, the click of handcuffs,

their wide-eyed silence—

before needle caps and blood on

the bathroom floor at the Circle K—

bad words erupting into fistfights,

tear-stained cheeks, naked all night­—

before you disappear from them forever,

see the clean slate of the soul you seek,

the one you lost, the one you beat with

broken wings. Please come back to us.

Morning Meditation along Highway 48

I pray to the fat robin perched in the naked redbud

leaning over the creek, and to all the trees tilting inward

there, as though peering into the shallows,

and to the needleless pines with their backs to the stars

and to the fields like a mirror, the shepherd's purse.

Sometimes in the valley fog I forget which season it is,

whether summer is coming, those long sunny days and the mourning dove,

or the cold is settling in, about to bury us in an avalanche of deer bones.

Sometimes I only remember the yellow heart of this earth,

and I want to ask, What now, redbuds?

Who tells the robins when to sleep?

And where do I go, old crooked highway?

Which way is home?