ROPE OF SAND

Thin ice appears and disappears,

Hourglasses break and spill sand,

Every being is as fragile as light,

Succumbing to the night of things.

Even a figure cast in stone

Erodes in wind-blown sand and rain,

Falls and breaks an arm or leg,

Stumbling into the night of things.

Even a season’s leaves and seeds

Float away and travel upon air or water waves,

End their journeys upon old rot and decay,

Crumbling into the night of things.

Just as a rope of sand splashes on the floor,

Beside a broken glass, it is the present

That flickers in and out

Vanishing into the night of things.

©cmheuer, November, 2016

ACORNS

Buckets of acorns sit at the base of old giant oaks,

Annual collections quantifiably rich and deep,

I dip into them with my hands,

Let the green droplets and their brown caps

Sift through my fingers like gold coins,

Dump them into pig feeders and

Watch the rooting snouts feast on bitter seeds

While I stand outside of the fence,

Where walnuts and hickory nuts scatter at my feet,

Fewer in number, cloaked in tough skins and thick shells,

I break them with a hammer to dig out their meat

To feed myself.

Squirrels hoard what they can carry.

Bound to seasonal tides, we share ritual meals,

Leave behind enough to reseed and grow,

Wait out the lean months,

Then gather together for another harvest moon

Beneath the oak, walnut, and hickory trees. 

© cmheuer, September, 2016  

INVECTIVES

Untended, poison oak injures

Wild flowers and running cedar,

Usurps water and nutrients, spreads voraciously;

Untended, poison ivy climbs onto walnut branches,

Embeds root tentacles in rough bark

To support the three-leaved vertical climb,

Tendrils wrap around thin twigs,

Secure surreptitious ascents,

Take sun away from the old tree’s pinnate leaves.

They both breed in the worst of soils,

Where their early spring pioneers multiplied

Like words spilled from viper spit,

Angry earworms—repeated

In refrains, themes, and musical phrases.

Untended, diatribes spread across

Language maps, like ancient wandering clans,

Seeds slung back and forth upon a heavy wind,

To settle in the midst of poetic groves,

To swarm in library hives and overwrite the books

With brazen, meaty, buzz words

Replicate in all soils and create a rash of

Intemperate sounds.

© cmheuer  

ROLLER COASTER RIDES

Roller coaster rides leave my hair standing on end,

After I am dropped down the dips and around the curves,

Chugged up the steep climbs, rocked back and forth,

Lurched up and down, and thrown around like a ragbag.

I hold on for dear life,

Scream out the worst of terrors, and

Squeeze my eyes shut to block out the light.

How can anyone stay in the seat,

When I slosh like water in a swinging bucket,

Think I am going to be catapulted into the scaffolding,

Thrown on the tracks, and dispatched to another world

By a line of cars racing across me as they fall down

Mountainous heights and squeal around hairpin turns

That steal my intestinal fortitude and devil-may-care grin

I brandished when I queued up in the long line of riders.

At the end, others yell with delight,

Spring out of their seats with a bounce in their steps,

While my legs wobble and quake on level ground

As if the earth were shaking from after-shocks,

As if all the slow mountainous ascents and fast, precipitous falls

Had stolen my life’s delicate balance.

© cmheuer, 2016

MILKY QUARTZ

High-gloss stones salt the fields and woods

With opaque or translucent facets 

In sun or shade. 

Some are too large to dig out of the earth,

Others are lying on the surface as if abandoned,

Common rocks in continental crusts.

I gather them as if they were a harvest,

I make piles of them as if I were building cairns,

Shapeless monuments to those scattered and adrift

In clay or dirt,

Uncovered by wind and rain, their crystals stained,

Their cast-away light beckoning

Toward the immutable remains of cold, molten magma

Stacked along the sides of the fields and woods

For deer and bear to disburse, for seedlings to displace,

For me to rediscover after the dogwoods have bloomed,

The hay has been cut, the leaves have fallen,

And snow covers the earth. 

© cmheuer, 2016

CAVE DWELLER

In a scramble of words, there must be an entrance,

A large opening or a crawl space hidden by rubble

With only the rush of cool air as a telltale sign

Of the subterranean darkness that shuns light

And reeks of foreboding.

Yet there may be ciphers on the walls,

Prehistoric hand prints, pictographs, and petroglyphs,

Signs left by the first minds for others to follow into

Networked corridors with strange columns and crystals,

Underground streams, and unconscious formations.

For beneath the surface lie fragile outlines,

Obscured by firelight’s mysterious shadows,

Weathered, cavernous underpinnings that slowly erode,

Sculpting out of stone the structures that we see,

Labyrinths secluded, unthreaded, and unsolved whose

Minotaurs are concealed while explorers

Wander endlessly through passages of art. 

© cmheuer, 2016

EARTH SPIN

Blue Marble, you were a globe on a stand,

An old circular map above the chalk board,

A punishing weight on the shoulders of Atlas and Hercules.

You were too vast for legs to walk around,

Too deep for minds to comprehend,

Too mutable to be a safe haven. 

You were covered by the living and the dead,

Who clung to your surface like strangling, spiral vines,

Who rose upwards to escape your own fisted clutch.

Now you are suspended in a colorful glaze that hides the scars,

No more than an endangered disk set against an insubstantial night,

No more than a vanishing point in a mechanical eye.

© cmheuer, 2016

TIGER SWALLOWTAILS (for Sean and Meghan)

It is the pattern

On the large wings that makes my eyes sway;

Not the fluttering from blossom to blossom, nor the aerial acrobatics.

It is the fragile yellow brane

With black tiger stripes, blue patches, and orange spots.

Sun-flickered in a swift run just above the earth, the design delivers

Its knockout punch and leaves me stunned, dragged from flower to flower

By an alchemist’s golden promise or a sorcerer’s magic cloak

As if I were the one caught in a butterfly net.

My eyes lock onto one, but others command the sidelines,

Stand at rest with wings drawn straight up or spread out trembling,

Displayed and primed for instant flight among the opening buds

Spur memories of metamorphic brown caterpillars can grow wings,

Soar upon spring air, and lay claim to the enchanted symmetry

Of Blake’s "Tiger" even though their wings may have been torn and

Can never be repaired.

© cmheuer, 2016 

THE UNKNOWN

At the edge of knowledge, the unknown begins;

Buried within knowledge, the unknown lies;

Masked by knowledge, the unknown is disguised.

In a small boat to peer over the side

At a pond’s depth when the surface is calm

And see nothing beyond a few inches at most.

In despair to raise head and eyes towards

The sky is no more than a shallow glance

Of sun on what appears to be evident  

Is no more than a blinding, superficial glare.

The learned lead to mountains of the unknown;

Chisel away at the feet of the behemoths;

Climb as high as footholds allow. 

The learned lead to the abyss of the unknown;

Stand at the brink and watch the bottomless pit grow larger;

Throw their tokens into the bowels of the earth;

Take soundings; and postulate.

For all that is known is never as large as the unknown

Rapidly outgrows knowledge;

Discards it like an exoskeleton or a cocoon;

Emerges in different forms; multiplies and expands

Beyond anything a human mind can begin to understand.

© cmheuer, 2016

IN THE WIND

Voices whisper in the empty spaces between winter tree trunks

            and above un-leaved branches.

Voices shout in canyons between glass and steel towers

            and along alleys carved out of brick walls.

Voices throw their breath across ocean waves

            and into subterranean caverns.

Audiences flit in and out among the murmurs and the oratory.

They hear odd reverberations and flutter in response.

Their backs bend against the force of the speaker,

Braced for percussive gusts and winds

That sound out a brief space of time,

Tumble dead leaves, and whistle around corners.

Pine needles fan out-- jostle the ones alongside,

Catching the resonance with their nimble fingers,

Strumming along with thin air

In a flight of fancy on a clear day,

While vine stalks sway back and forth as if there is a rhythm

In the ebb and flow of an invisible tide,

Deep and shallow breaths are cast off,

Like water from the shake of long, wet hair--

Like discarded old clothes, thin and ragged.

Twigs fall to the ground; tin cans skip down the street;

Waves carry away the sand; and caverns echo

The sough of the wind.

© cmheuer, 2016  

IRON HORSES

I listen.  The distant pulse of the diesel’s roar

Precedes a rumbled earth that mimes a slight quake.

I steady myself.  My heart drums louder.

The air horn’s rhythmic blast signals

A crossing where red eyes flash,

Armed gates close, and bells send warnings.

I stop reading at once.  The cacophony recedes.

My alarm subsides.  Back in time, the wheels clack.

Some days, my seat faced backward.

The window images retreated, instead of advancing.

Dizzy, but spellbound, I knew only what had passed

As I tunneled through the miles, 
Not seeing where I was going,
Only where I had been.
    

I look up.  The evening transit of an iron horse

Brings memories into the lamp light.

Shadows that journey into the present from the past

And carry me with them.

© cmheuer, 2016