A RANDOM THOUGHT

A dogwood petal in air,

A light wind directs its fall,

Motion blurs its surrounding colors,

In its flight, in its exquisite focus,

It is a sail,

At the wide outer edge,

Curled up into two lobes,

A tip of reddish brown above

A wing unfurled

And set upon the grass,

Among others

Scattered around

A tree’s circle, a pilgrim,

In solemn respect.

© cmheuer, 2013

9-11-2001

When the emblazoned shields like glass

break and rain down,

When steel girders melt near the sun

and fall uprooted and twisted,

There is no solace, no ancient

philosopher to stir the ashes,

While our primal vision descends the stairs

and cloaks the ruins,

Where the raw edge of being lies

Exposed and our eyes shudder.

© cmheuer, 2013

POND ICE

One footstep on the edge of the ice reverberates

In a slow march across the pond, through air to tree tops,

Broken, hyphenated sounds

Make the foot pull back before the ice caves.

Sound measures when the eyes can’t see

Through clear, corrugated water, solid enough for

Tree images to reflect from the middle of the pond frozen

Still In the light of a cold sun; the sharp surface retort

Rejects the weight of a tentative step rings out

Across the surface and silences the birds’ calls.

Water and air divided, uneven and uncertain,

Imprinted with weightless tree replicas,

Their top branches copied onto the center,

Close enough to touch if footsteps were not too heavy.

A thin crust thickens in time, keeps the fluid layer warm,

Creates a stone silence at the edge of a field,

Holds simple waves captive at their peaks,

Like fossils from the first cold wind left to stand in mid-stroke,

Their march suspended in mid-step,

As a foot, held back quickly at the sound of an alarm.

© cmheuer, 2013

OPEN BOOK

If trees and moss were bound and stitched to a forest floor

Like pages to leather covers;

Nature would be a narrative, like an open book,

Spine aligned with front and back pages,

Leaves slightly bowed up from the center

Or flipped backwards and forwards in a light wind.

Days would be marked on the pages and ordinary things would

Drive the action:  a tree might lose a limb; a fox might catch a rabbit.

As actions become a plot, sometimes on stage,

Sometimes behind the foliage,

The number of characters would be endless,

And on the surface all would appear as a setting where

Only the most obvious plots could be read.

A narrative assumes detail; leaves it hidden between the lines,

Sums it up in a word or a sentence, ignores what is presumed irrelevant,

Because only the largest plots can be discerned

While swarms of the smallest bits and pieces that

Assemble, disassemble, and reassemble,  

Create subplots that virtually appear and disappear.

If a writer were to capture a bit of it, and

Another writer were to capture another bit of it,

Would the sum of the plots and subplots of all the writers create a universe,

Like a Borges Library, or would it always be incomplete,

Like an alphabet of infinite characters with something always outside of it?

© cmheuer, 2013

AFTER THE VERNAL EQUINOX

Quiet drumming on the shingles,

Rivulets run down the slope of the woodland floor,

Flood the naturalized daffodils as the drums beat louder,

Splatter the improvised reservoirs of rain water,

Dammed up behind the moss mounds,

Spread around the sides with channels of current swifter than the drums,

Carry specks of winter’s earth, bits of leaves and brown evergreen needles,

Water the earth’s crust and flow east.

Rivulets join channels join reservoirs,

Patch and cover winter’s bare earth;

A gradual slope slowly erodes and levels,

In a shallow backyard flood, the drums beat louder.

The sun’s heralds recede before it arrives,

The drums are silent, the water seeps into the earth,

Drifts into the woodlands;

New light spreads across the moss mounds,

Flows in rivulets and channels around the tree trunks,

Fills in every fissure of the earth’s skin,

Highlights hollows, ripples, and wrinkles,

Meanders and cascades along the sinuous veins,

Shadows tall pine spires and deciduous tree branches,

Illuminates newborn translucent leaves barely unfurled,

Drenches a multitude of azalea blossoms clustered,

Creates a thin, breathing membrane in vibrant Technicolor;

Pollen spreads in clouds of green and yellow dust,

Seeds sprout and start the arduous climb towards the sun.

All of this,

After the day and the night are equally long,

After neither half of the earth points directly at the sun,

After the northern hemisphere’s vernal equinox,

After the first day of the sun’s New Year. 

© cmheuer, 2013

SCHOOL DESK IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO

Plain tablet desks queued from the back of the room to the front,

And from side to side, with an occasional one set askew in a corner

Or some other empty space just big enough to hold the functional

Wooden design with slats underneath for books and a

Flat top curved and rounded like a student’s relaxed position

With head tilted to the back of the chair and

Hips slid to the edge of the seat for a day of inornate study drills

And recitations that replayed memories like Gregorian Chants. 

Words and numbers sprawled out across the room,

Reverberated in corners, and attached to chalk boards or paper

For the eyes to affirm what the ears had heard.

Parades of voices played across the din of shuffling feet--

Wooden joints creaked and wooden legs scraped;

Restless, muscled bones shifted in a rhythmic march

Of steps in tune, the cadence set, in a game of musical chairs

Until there is only one left, salvaged and set 

In the center of an artist’s studio for an old poet,

Eyes caught in a flurry of taborets, brushes, palettes,

And an empty dijon mustard jar among the landscapes

Streamed along the wall, cupboarded in floor shelves,

Leaned against one another like books stacked in a library row.

Snow-covered earth; morning-lit, river-tree branches;

Dark-grotto water lilies; frozen and flooded farm fields; turbulent clouds;

Stone boulders; and rock faces.   Sun-lit, shadowed ponds and rivers

Fused the mirror with the mirrored, and the aged poet’s

Gaze enveloped each painting as if wind clouds or

River currents, unbound and wild, buffeted against the surfaces

With light from another’s mind memorized and stored, she

Looked away from the tablet arm because words didn’t need to

Touch the artist’s ear.

© cmheuer, 2013

BIRD’S NEST

To find a bird’s nest where a wasp’s nest had been

Reversed the order of things.

Where a bird’s nest had been the year before,

A wasp’s nest had been built after a snake

Crawled up the porch post and found the eggs in

A corner next to the ceiling. 

The mother bird sat on the railing below the nest

For a week or so, not singing, but

Making a loud bird noise.

The wasps had their mythical chimera, too;

A giant two-legged, two-armed, one-segmented torso

And head brandished a broom stick and felled their paper nest at dusk,

Sweeping it from the porch to the ground.

The wasps returned and quietly

Rebuilt their large paper comb

Out of mandible-chewed wood pulp.

Rocky ledges, treetop aeries, eaves,

Earthen mounds, flat lands, and beaches lure

Nest builders with a ritual numerical chant:

Some will survive against all odds.

All others don’t.

And the mother bird sits on the sidewalk next to the

Bird’s nest where the wasp’s nest had been and

Makes a loud bird noise.

© cmheuer, 2013 

SILENCE LONG PRACTICED

The slight rise of the hill,

Before the sharp right turn,

Obscures more than the earliest

Angle of the cars’ lights

Before the dawn the low slung

Beams spread across the tar

And stone skipped across the higher

Rise of the eye’s need to see

His features cleared,

Transparent in the background

Shifts behind each eye movement,

Each changed lip curve

Implies meaning, a hidden scene,

A word unspoken from

Silence long practiced

Until one eye questions another eye

And the foreground shifts

In front of each early morning’s

Scene each feature is overlaid

Each voiced sound rises and cancels

Out the view until their spoken words recede.

© cmheuer, 2013

LAST SUMMER’S BLOSSOMS

Daffodils sprout in the sun,

Mosses spread in the shadows of the wood lines,

Three-legged pine needles scatter across the ground,

Collect among low-lying bushes;

Pine cones sit at the feet of the trees’ trunks, and

Last summer’s blossoms, dried brown, on a snowball shrub,

Linger like desiccated memories held fast upon neural branches,

As sudden gusts of wind slowly erode each petal from

Last summer’s round froth bubbles,

A memory becomes fainter and fainter,

Edges blur and few kernels of the blooms remain,

Distorted and skewed from the motion of wind and time.

Stalks that bore them are leafless, dry strands that

Bear the weight of the newborn shoots and hold them

Above ground for a season of new baubles to reflect a sun’s light.  

© cmheuer, 2013

THE WAVE OF A GRAY WOOL SCARF

Clouds cover the sun

The rest of the moon’s crescent

And the morning star

Screened through water vapor

Some light emerges

Subdued by the wave of a gray wool scarf

In the slow motion wind

Raises the leaves from their

Late burial

Lifts the wings of the gulls

Drift inland, flock to the edge

Of the brick building’s

Flat roof

Intrudes, cuts across the

Dim, gray air

     The squeal of the gull

     Lies below the clouds

     Above his face

     The shout of the gull

Raises his eyes

Tips his chin away

From the shrubs and the road.

© cmheuer, 2013

WINTER PRELUDE

Everything thrown away collects and litters,

Empty cups and paper wrappers along a roadside ditch,

Broken branches and furrowed bark laid out among ferns,

Like afterthoughts disconnected and meaningless until

An early sharp drop freezes leaves and pine needles to

Moss threads or brown grass strands and

Scatters hoarfrost around like seeds

After strong winds plow through at ground level.

Vapor and dew crystallize in uniform cover

Fields turn into a white-frothed sea

Parsed by bordering tree-trunk pillars

Give ancient Grecian depth and

I wonder when the rime is going to rise

Above the lines of the tree trunks’

Dark high water marks,

 And flow beyond the edge of the field,

And flood the rubbish-mottled floor of my mind,

While a woman, bare-headed, stands in the wings

By bare-branched trees. 

© cmheuer, 2013

OCTOBER

one bare branch at the top of

a tree like a bare bone held out

to fool the gingerbread witch

or a crow’s perch, wings

folded closed

against the wind

and the call is heard

above the rusty leaves

below the sun’s rise,

the streak across the sky

and another bird lights upon another branch

leaved and shaken

by an early, eerie breath

© cmheuer, 2013

GATHERING DEADWOOD

Littered with debris, the forest floor

Heaves with the decay of branches and twigs,

Caves in from the weight of fallen tree trunks that

Indent the surface of the humus with their form and length.

Deep burrows form as stumps and roots soften,

And the leaf cover is adamant as it cloaks the deadwood. 

The gatherer stacks the pieces, works around a center,

Reclaims each stray remnant, and builds a mound,

Earthen works in disguise, built from branching fractals and

Hand-sawed logs dripping bark as they’re lifted onto the pile,

Much as a bird would build a nest of sticks and twigs

Before lining it with moss and feathers.

Mounds multiply across the forest floor

Debris falls on schedule like shadows,

Like words broken from the tongue and

Fallen through the air unheard,

Lost at the foot of a tree, mixed with the birds’ calls and the wind’s sigh,

Sounds that stop after the tree falls.

Each piece designs the mound as it is heaved into place

Unevenly balanced on logs or branches already laid until the tangle

Catches and weaves a labyrinthine, rounded shape

That slowly fades with time.

© cmheuer, 2013

A CHAIN FOR THE PRISONER

out of the school bus window

waiting to pass by the

sheriff’s car, state trucks,

and picks swung ripping through

the spring damp earth shoveled high

                                                          above the wild seed, buried

                                                spirit’s breath, swelling

                                      earth, round and full

                             brow raised

                   by one whose eye rolled

deep into its corner

stealing past

a well-aimed gun

such small windows

crack

who knows when

gravel, stone, or bullet hits

and some rough seam

splits

both sides

into

a back-road kid who

wears the un-ironed cloth

of a poor man’s son,

the coarse-grained shirt

that rubs its sleeve

across his lips

to wipe away the morning’s

milk and crumbs

before he spits

and rubs and

spits, and rubs

his sleeve

against the cleared

glass view holds out

beyond his reach,

a morning breeze

and

a working crew –

chain gang, around him

words that slip

from others’ tongues work

their bond, link by link,

from child to child,

to shape the men that swing

their picks and lift their

shovels high –

who hide the earth-born

spirit’s breath, young spring

that lingers still

rides free upon a young man’s feet

unbound to work before

the sheriff’s gun,

runs wild and swift

to greet

a breeze-swept face

one broken link

unlocks their tongues’ iron-grasp

and lets him reach

far out of the window

waving smile wide

in a silent show

one prisoner’s arched brow,

his light skip and jump

mock doffed cap

and bells rung

soundless in his sly

and wind-sprung mime

© christina heuer, 2014

TRAILS OF SAWDUST

Large pines lie crisscrossed,

Decayed wood bare of bark

Softens and turns darker

Than ground moss or the leaf bed.

Tall statures no longer fed, but feeding,

Branched crowns broken and scattered,

Roots relieved of towering weights,

Feet that had never stumbled left

Trails of sawdust as drought spread

Across the calendar and the aerial maps.

Clustered, the fallen lie without canopy or shadow,

A sun baked forest floor teems

With unseen and negative powers of ten that

Spiral down into the dead wood,

As a stray buck and doe break out of a stand

Of unfallen trees and stop, freeze-framed,

Eyes wide open and nostrils flared,

Hooves planted on parched earth,

They wait at the edge of a wooden bone yard

And then step carefully towards

A path where dense shadows crouch.

© cmheuer, 2013

AFTER THE STORM

After the storm, snow bulldozed onto the sidelines,
the streets are clear enough for early morning travel
to repeat itself, uncluttered by a childish wish,
even the heaviest mounds
can't prevent the flight, except for a bird's migration,
nor can they hold back the first floods that have begun to trickle,
nor the frigid cold that will evaporate
with the sun's appearance

on stage
there will be the least of sets,
a painted snow drift and tree,
two characters in normal dress,
under the lights,
speak in a stage whisper--an aside,
and there will be a hint of what might be a snowfall romance
if they disappeared behind the curtain

two characters might appear on an empty stage
in a diffused light
there is no speech before
the morning rises
or before the evening falls
because two characters are erased
and a pencil is set aside


© cmheuer, 2013

STUBBORN LEAVES

The wind is easy at first

A slight tug at stubborn leaves

Ruffed to the east

Before the speed rises

And the rapid flutter

Stands each limb at full attention.

From a distance the

Leaves swarm

In search of some semblance

To the evergreen’s needled cover

To leave bare-limbed

The thickened trunk.

© cmheuer, 2013

WINDOW DRESSING

Sometimes there is a pause between winter and spring

When the boundary that divides them catches the eye

And the wind stops long enough to catch its breath

Before the window dressing begins,

While the trees are still bare mannequins and

Backdrops are wild-brush, split-hair stems, left over

Brown leaves, pine cones and needles

Strewn about as if someone had stopped mid-stream

And walked off leaving nothing but debris.

Amethyst tinged fields of henbit and green clover

Hawk the color bounty

That spreads out among branches and stalks,

Each tricked out in nature’s latest fashion sense,

An animated window scene changes over

In a makeshift pattern that baits the eye

And reels in the boundary line

Hiding stark remnants and discarded fragments

From a timeworn display.

© cmheuer, 2013

COMET HYAKUTAKE

Ill portent notwithstanding

There is a tension in the air

An evening hush that draws

The eye to the east, a fist’s

Distance from Arcturuus,

Out of focus, yet visible to the naked eyes’

Unconscious attention, no more

Than some unknown function of the

Brain lays out the night sky

The same as you see it.

An object is easier to describe

Than a subject’s word or action

Is not as predictable as a comet’s path

Through a weightless space we can’t

Explore being old, perhaps

Like fossils, preserved

Cosmic dust and ice particles

Captured in an orbit and spun

Faster around the sun

Than around its outer arc

Where ice does not vaporize

From heat and the earth

Appears as remote as a gas giant

Seen near the moon,

Brighter than more distant

Suns that we call stars

And I posit my theory of their

Planetary systems, laid out by

An ancient function of the brain,

Is different from your imagined universe,

And we laugh because here

There are no objects

To exert their will upon us

Because what is unknown changes

From you to me, and perhaps

The universe is not as old as

We thought, nor we.

© cmheuer, 2013

TIME INDIVISIBLE

Break time into its indivisible pieces

And throw them loose into a drawer

Like photographs mixed up and out of order,

Or shuffle them like a deck of cards

And throw them on the floor in a game of 52-pickup,

Or scramble them like letters of the alphabet

And pick them out from a pile of upside down tiles.

Reassemble them using clockwork unwound,

Without an arrow’s direction, without a straight-line flow;

Create other patterns or not; design an image with

Bits unrelated, side-by-side, time without meaning,

Time with accidental designs among the haphazard array,and

No more than a flattened globe of

Scattered bits tossed out upon a sea of space,

At the mercy of current, wind, storm and water becalmed,

The imagination creates an assembly

With senses dulled or nonexistent;

Flights of fancy built into new mythic forms
As the search for a line or an image 
without any tense but the eternal present,

Exhausts all possibilities.

   

© cmheuer, 2013

TWO-SPOTTED GLARE

Two-spotted glare of halogen

lit and queued, crawls

between the lines, as a

plump green caterpillar

undulates

one foot at a time

onto the main artery

dissected and shifted

crosses the line

loosed segments couple, and the

motion is set, the speed

is trimmed back, and the

curl of the road is

stretched taut between

two points, knotted at

each end and lit by the low-beamed crawl.

© cmheuer, 2013

CROSS SECTION

Worn thin at the base of the tree by deer or dogs,

Crusted coat of the loblolly,

Giant lizard skin in bright light,

Picked clean of larvae by the nuthatch and ladder-back woodpecker,

Cleaved into toe and hand holds for the brown squirrel’s steep climb,

Sloughed off no less than an outer skin as the year’s ring grows,

Brittle, leathered brown scales,

Like feathers, rising from ancient dinosaur bones.

Circumference builds, layer by  layer,

Trunk, branches, limbs, and roots circle wider,

Music’s disk played out in annual random notes

Beneath the corrugated grooves and ridges

Basic strings hold together, in a quantum dance,

Addition rules like a wordsmith’s grammar.

© cmheuer, 2013  

WHAT IS THERE ABOUT THE DISTANCE?

What is there about the distance

Between you and me

Some absolute definition in feet or miles

It is the same

Unless a glance askew

Can bridge the silence

And the minute hand’s

Slow movement across the end

Of one day and the beginning

Of the next

Can repeat the moment

Does not have to be sequential

Does not have to shift from one

Foot to another in a long-standing wait

And by repetition can make a

Line into a single point

Is closer to the universe’s hypothesized

Beginning, which neither you nor I

Can reverse the way a seed can be

Unearthed or the forgotten can

Be exhumed and re-lit

Eye to eye there is a gaze

Broken by the lids’ involuntary

And irregular, open and shut

Avowal to the interrupted

Stream of our images

In a ritual exchange, traded

Hold more than we could glean

By sifting through all

Recollection.

© cmheuer, 2013

THE PAINTING

Brushstrokes embed the fury and hurl the

Stones, fired in a volcano’s ancient kiln and lifted above

Younger rocks, to form a molten bed for the river’s flow

And the forest’s roots. 

Water rushes down the mountain slope, stumbles

Over the stone boulders and falls in a white froth

Churning earth and lichens into

Irregular brushes of color that sear the canvas 

Brown and black. 

Tall, fallen trunks uncover skylights

Within the green and tanned canopy;

Dark shadows crawl between the trees and

Float in the turbulent water that unearths and

Bathes the blue granite and slate, cooling the earth,

Where the river gathers in rocky crevices;

Draws stones and trees to its sides;

Tells epic stories of the mountain’s creation;

Smooths out the clock’s hands; unravels the surface present;

And flows into the past as invisibly as the

Thinnest crest of now.

© cmheuer, 2013

WINGLESS FLIGHT

Lumber, steel, concrete multiply

Consume square feet

Beneath the geese, gull, and other flocks that

Increase on small grass plots,

Migrate along the oldest routes,

Perch on the flat roof

Of a deserted retail store,

Obsolete among a grid

Of empty parking lots.

There is an observer, who visits,

Unseen among a flock of starlings

In a flight show, the yellow beak

Is seen, the spattered breast

And cropped tail repeated for

Each bird identifies its kind

Picks through the debris, scatters

The dust with their wings

Pass before the intruder in mass

A sudden fly by and hover

Surrounds the single face,

Shades the eyes, startled.

As a sudden noise might take

The breath away or weaken the legs;

Might stop the eye lids’

Carefully timed closure or turn

The head to align the ear

Or brace the foot

For the start of the flight

From the observed, the studied,

The single mind among many

Twists the plot to be unraveled

Stretches out the morning’s pause

Gives the wingless a moment’s

Flight among the migrants.

© cmheuer, 2013