National Poetry Month : Stephen Brockwell,

 

Desert Signals
for Jason Christie

1—Oasis

The northern winter taught me
to forget the scent of water.
These palms teach me
to inhale the fronds
close enough to make my nostrils
bleed on the spines.

A cloud of small flies
finds my deodorant botanical.
Nothing like a helmet of flies
to make you empathize
with the infiltration
of the powerless.

Water and sulfur. This oily
glimmer, contaminant or
uprising of the natural
n-ane chains
under this fault,
this aquifer fissure.

Tiny golden satellite dishes
of the creosote bush flowers
nectar-signal the bees after
yesterday’s improbable shower.
The bees triangulate
and stuff their pockets.

I sneeze as if every enfolded lobe
of my brain was departing
the condemned apartments of my body
to merge with the clear signal
of these grains of pollen   
gilding the desert sand.

2—Horizon

Remember that night Jupiter was horizontal
with the waning gibbous moon.
The planet-moon scribble on the sky page
bestowed breath to the tongue of the encoding air,
a celestial flip book that, weightless, falls away.

The horizon inscribed two messages that night:
one written on the landscape,
an Arabic of the desert neither sinister nor dexterous.
The other, an emphatic declaration,
moon vowel, planet consonant.

But all the mass on that small bright dot!
I know that percussive pinhole full stop
is a blue whale to the chihuahua moon.
How? No parallax of thought triangulates
my knowing to original voices.

No thought Big Bang discernible prior to text.
All thoughts as ephemeral as the breath that speaks them
charged by the context of expression,
the fresh or defective copy the listener rethinks,
voices compressed into dots:

signal, absence of signal.
We know the thinker is ephemeral.
When the moon and Jupiter write again
a title to the poem of the desert horizon
who will be wandering the desert to read it?

 

 

 

 

Stephen Brockwell is an Ottawa poet. His book All of Us Reticent Here Together won the Archibald Lampman award in 2017. He is a software development director at the Environmental Systems Research Institute.