Torched Verse Ends

Steven D. Schroeder

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

Torched Verse Ends by Steven D. Schroeder Copyright 2009 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book Design by Geoffrey Gatza Cover Photo by Page Loudon First Edition ISBN: 1-934289-71-X ISBN 13: 978-1-934289-71-6 Library of Congress Number: BlazeVOX [books] 14 Tremaine Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 Editor@blazevox.org

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Flee the Beast or Be the Feast West of heated East of eat Draughts no water Drinks in drought Tongue without mouth Roar without lungs Scars without claws Runs without pause Son of lightning Sun of mankind Lights nighttime Dims sunshine Downhill deadfall Revived upslope Leaps over river Leaps over road Oilblack trail Tail of smoke Hollows wall Swallows hall Windless wing Song of cinder Lands in timber Ends in ember

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Hayman Wildfire Set by Forest Service Worker That you spotted the fire and the starter That he drove a gold minivan, a smokescreen obvious as pyrocumulus covering Pikes Peak That he lurched into yellow sky to escape, chased across four counties by those thousands of torches searching for a monster That you but not yourself ignited the fire That drought winds and updrafts could waft you away, spreading embers over river and highway That hotshot crews with pulaskis clearing firebreaks, sweat baked out, would clear your name among the mulch and rootbound soil That a letter from your estranged ex lit the fire That matchsticks and paper turned arson upside-down here to build a pyre of human fuel That the campfire ring of rocks fit for your finger crowned no trees, and its dying to ash lasted less than twenty days That a helicopter shuddering above forest stubble can feast on sides of beef lying barbecued near burned carcasses of barns That replanted ponderosa pine seedlings can feed on satellite feeds for twenty years That fire started you

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Coal Seam Fire The kobolds in the coal slumber with livid blood because we long forgot to sacrifice our offspring. Cut veins awaken them after we mine the ores hoarded for centuries. Sunlight plus oxygen makes nitroglycerin we flick lit cigarettes on dynamite, then act surprised. Eyepits ignited, the goblins underground metastasize the masses out of their sleeper cells deeper beneath stone skin than we can probe with pokers. These elementals haunt us with a coal heart that smolders until we let them smother our children in their beds.

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Storm King The weather god says whose this is: his thunderheads along the hogback, his wall above the Colorado, his wave the western drainage will cough across his ridgeline, his firefighters caught in his flash fast as his squirrels. On Hells Gate Point, his fourteen dead alight inside one pion pine.

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Phoenix, Colorado The woodstove at the cabins center, where every star collapses, stirs up its apparitions: aspen goldleaf, mule deer beguiled by salt and song, camp-robber courts for Stellers jays grazing the rail in sunlit crowns. That creek becomes the Colorado Earths curve intensifies downhill beyond the glacial glass in frames of beetlekilled blue spruce. In folktales, some nests hold snakeling eggs, some cages dont hold, and some things never die, damn liars, but wink from grates and doors. A ring where trees retreatedbeneath the gravel, char. Like stars, this family: one generation fuels the next. Pentatonic music, rocks forgotten on the mountainside. We reemerge and wait all night for sizzling rain on the steel roof, then rise in sun, no longer ashen.

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Colorado Strata Fire scars in aspen rings near Aspen bulldozed over Front Range stripmining barrens that suburb papers over Mesa Verde dwellings built by helicopter over Era of airports hewn from San Juan stone not over NORAD bored under Cheyenne Mountain starting over Pikes Peak with neon street sign superimposed over Denver overpass above another overpass over Semi trucks hauling Rockies rock by rock over I-70 out to Kansas over and over and over

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Crestone Conglomerate The world wads its chewed gum: pinks and greens, quartzite and granite glued by silica and river saliva. The slab, four thousand feet thick and six miles long, stuck under the desk of the Sangre de Cristo range, peeks through lichen like a petrified, regifted fruitcake from a Precambrian basement. The world matures. All the old saws of erosion (wind abrasion, whirring alluvial fans) carry a microcosm of these compositessized and shaped from fists to houses, component clasts from fingertips to microwaves into the San Luis Valley to fall by what becomes in callow ages a dirt road. The world weathers again. A wizened visitor dislodges one stone from its vast wrapper, the pack of swept silt. Observing the universe in its variegation of binding sands, gneisses and schists once in an ocean, the finder brushes dust, polishes the artifact, and pockets it to present to a family member, an incomplete gumpopping conglomerate who snaps What in the world is that? A rock?

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Animal Sentinel Maximal Underdog disguisemagpies spy on toetapped telephone wires, surveilling the squirrel, ground under tire tread, who tracked a black box in my wheel well. Cant transfer that landline to cellular: the hawk moth stalking me state to state cracks static with satellite antennae. I watch the watchers. A shadowy rabbit crouches in a drainage ditch by my home, activates Beta-carotene night vision and revs for the getaway. In the basement, past security, the centipede sneaks secrets from beneath bipedal bare feet, escape route a scuttle out casement rot. My own inoffensive goldfish flies interference. Its paranoiamal. Outdoors, conspiracy cleanup crews: beacons beckon on whitetail deer hunting me the long way, and a squad of frogstop swampifiersfogs the atmosphere with fear. Alligator? Killigator, drowsing as I drop pennies in its open eyes and wish Big Daddy Longlegs would leave me be.

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City Seeking People Who will walk through the parks dropping flares every third step in jungled underbrush, through parking lots where vulpine trees coathanger keys from Ford windows cracked for somebody elses baby, through clipped leaves left green in front of ATMs as springwater sprinkles gutters and the utility meter tolls tailspin to infinity? No use looking in graveyard taverns, cave-ins under drive-in movie scavengers or riverboat casino decks overrun by river. Railcars coughing emphysema from iron lungs long among dung beetles and weeds. When evenings hurry in, vampire bats flurry from megachurches and mall stores. In skyscrapers, the cables on ravenous elevators hoist them past the 101st floor, taut for the clawcut, set to settle fast as falcon on field mouse.

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In This Country, Trail Breaks You Rocks jammed in your backpack launched uphill avalanches in air so sheer and sharpened it hyperventilated your icecarved lungs. And barbwire brambles replacing biceps tauter than tent hitch knots locked you in nightsoaked sleeping bag dates embracing dirt. And mountain goats and lions with mounted crosshairs watched you, hunted. And when the pine branches untouched by wind gust whiplashed you, the sap and crack and needle scratch inside your forehead made you forget your citys surname. And river travels down your spine, and brook trout minnows dart in and out your mouth.

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All the Better to Eat You With, My Dear Out there a squirrel chitters in a cherrytree net, its limber limbed hug trembling up the trunk. In here a raccoon, fingers stuck in the butter churn, grips that glistening spread. Upstairs a penthouse built entirely of antlers shucked after rutting season by the elk mounted on the mantel, sleeping with their derrieres hung in the den. Ignore the granny panties beside the bed and fear no bachelor pawpad predator, no lady killer, no wolf whistling at sheep in haunch high stockings. The fleecy drapes match the bearskin rug. Past gums and teeth and lips and chops comes tongue.

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Bad Naturelover Nature is a MILF, overt estrus presenting bent over a tree stump. Rabbits overpopulatewe need more control, less lagomorphing, so I glue hooves to lucky feet, rack antlers to make jackalopes, and graft fruit tree branches onto cottontails. Come harvest, I peel apples slowly, wholly, as if their pelts will fetch me forty bucks at Fort Bridger inside their skin is soft, white fur. Soon I will grab rabapple pie in bunny oven mitts.

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Antropy Send your tourists toward us to honey our catacombs and render us in amber. Your Myrmidons will bomb us with larva-seeking aardvarks and firecracker strings, pluck us like ukuleles in stroking stinger fingers and break our necks. You nest wreckers who magnify anti-antenna rays and smoke our holes may fry five legs off, but well fire our formic acid pincers in your pants, spoil the picnic and pick the spoils, pouncing on your burial of your own heads in our sandhills. A chant to the mantis god, a drone crunched underfoot, a front door breach. Your sentry ends when you comprehend the skitter of our chitin hides in your closets, chitter chitter chitter.

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Stories from the Warming Wars New cars ran on tears and fired their gasoline from cannons. Factories ran on fear and fabricated only smokestacks. Artificial plants inhaled oxygen, exhaled chlorofluorocarbons. Babies toddled charcoal footprints. Cattle manufactured fertilizer, overflowing levees and chestwaders. Fish that mated laid eggs less developed than their legs. The final polar bear floated four starvation days before its floe unfroze with solar flair. Sun and a methane lens battled against central air. Sunburn and tornados met in the trailer park before they tore it up. Sunday and noon meant midway to volcano. Sun and on and on it went. Humidity licked and lapped humanity. Vigilantes caught a watermelon and beat that fruit with bats. Everyone constructed effigies of weathermen. Suddenly, somebody combusted.

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