Oblique
Maureen Flannery
She met him on
a diagonal street,
sleet coming down,
dark of the moon
coming up like a salty tide.
Knowing he lied
she went forth from him
disoriented and could
never again ascertain
true north.
Colors of Dying
Maureen Flannery
If only,
with right eyes,
we could delight
in the colors
of
each other's
dying
as we
do with
these trees
and not
need reasons
how much
radiance
we'd see
falling
in every
season.
Whimsy of a Despot
Maureen Flannery
Midway through its capricious rule
autocratic April,
true to its reputation,
imposed retrograde whiteness
onto frozen green grass
as forward flinging children,
dressed for summer,
pressed disbelieving faces
against cold window glass.
Heading Away from Sturgis
First Week of August
Maureen Flannery
Cattle curl agile tongues around
range feed where prairie grass
once swayed in a rolling, unbroken wave
between the big Mnisose wakpa and
the Paha Sapa.
Today Interstate 90
is an endless caravan of Harleys
like a stretched-out tapeworm winding
into the belly of the Black Hills.
Calumny
Maureen Flannery
Their fuzzy
opinions
clung
to his
accusations
the way colorless
dryer lint
follows itself
around
the trap.
In the Headlights
Maureen Flannery
Her breasts flashed forward
like headlights of a fast approaching truck
and he, the gentle buck,
stood broadside in the highway
destined to be roadkill
Lavender
Maureen Flannery
It was summer, before sundown.
She went out to say good-bye
rubbing small buds of lavender
between her breasts.
If he followed, hypnotized,
she would act surprised,
insist she hadn't guessed it.
On the Sidewalk
Maureen Flannery
He seems a slab of encrusted flesh.
Tired and the drink press him
like a vice against the sidewalk
where he deeply rests.
The Hook
Maureen Flannery
On which cast did it all become
a tangled mass of fishing line
a jumbled glob of useless leader
impossible now to unwind because
of the lure on one of the ends?
Utopia
Maureen Flannery
A place to live
the grace
of “less is more”
uplifted
by the holy word:
enough,
and another place
next door
to store the stuff
Silk Chiffon
Maureen Flannery
ripples
like lake water
around trout out-leaping.
Mist in a breeze,
it flows like air currents,
cool through strata of warm.
Billows of skirt sway
in filmy contrapuntal
echo of a body's motion,
hover around the gesture of legs
like the eyes of a lover.
Diaphanous as stratus clouds,
silk chiffon feels somehow airborne
as though
it would reclaim
its old drowned promise
of being gracefully
undulating
skyward
moth wings.
Sky Designs
Maureen Flannery
Early February and still cold
but these Vs of wild geese
know something hopeful.
They honk the holy noise of it
in compensating geometrics
across a gray morning sky.
Responsibility
Maureen Flannery
What I needed to do today was notice
the way gentle striations of gold and rose-gray
in the eastern sky distract the eye
from the vibrant color of the backyard firebush.
There is a list on the post-it of things
to accomplish÷household jobs and seasonal to-dos
for the few free hours at hand.
Some will be checked off
and others remain to encumber another day.
Now I can relax into the other tasks
knowing the one important thing
has been well done.
Tether
Maureen Flannery
She was his picket-pin
and he was free to roam
in a radius as wide
as the rope that tied
his left leg
to the cold metal stake
of her heart.
Adolescent Storm
Maureen Flannery
Blizzard of blaring gale winds postured anarchy.
Cold air with an attitude blew altering truth,
breaking glass, shattering reserve as youth,
flung sleeted debris from the street
against targets of anger like an angst-ridden teen,
swung on weight-tugged wires,
toppled trees as if they were time-rooted platitudes,
lugged horizon-loads of arctic snow,
unloaded on us, and sulked off, disgruntled,
leaving, where it had been, a strange
purging overhang of quiet icy whiteness.
After a Hard Winter
Maureen Flannery
Spring is being coaxed out of farm land
like a reticent child required to kiss
the coffin of his dead grandmother.
Ditch fires feed the air hungry for
the musty smell of old grass burning.
Colts and lambs leap their lack of
the weariness that clings like muddy manure
to boots of those who have weathered
the winter. Soiled remains of majestic drifts
ice themselves tenaciously to the shade of culverts.
The first farmers are in the fields with chisel plow
while their wives walk out-buildings
and groves of trees to assess
what bitter winter tried to take with her
as she went, wailing like a banshee,
to her long awaited death.
Avocado Plant
Maureen Flannery
Do we not hear the serenade
water sings, day after day,
to the hard-hearted pit of the avocado.
It says, Open, give way,
cleft yourself asunder
to begin that slow, two-fold reaching--
low into loamy darkness,
and upward to blue sky
for some chartreuse newness
that may come of your wound?
Ties
Maureen Flannery
She settled onto his disgust
as dust
to the contours of an unattended
sculpture
while shrinking options tightened
around her wrists
like stretched rawhide strips
in desert sun.
Western Sky
Maureen Flannery
domain of raptors,
captor of rancher's reverie,
plain of softly crenulated clouds
of held-in rain and drain-shaped twisters,
able, in a breath, to take things back to heaven
like the angel of death
Western Land
Maureen Flannery
is not a commodity,
isn't passive,
isn't merely ridden over,
fenced, proved up on,
hayed, irrigated, grazed.
It coils around your sense of self
and rises up in gullies
like a striking diamond-back.
It inserts mountainous power
into the inner workings of families,
demanding that generations
which have dispersed like scattered herds,
again recline on the same rocky bedground.
Subliminal as air,
it becomes what you are thinking
without thinking about it.
Linen
Maureen Flannery
Western sky,
like a sun bleached cotton sheet
is all you want over you
on a summer night.
Pioneer Spirit
Maureen Flannery
Perhaps it was not the land,
available for the slaving for,
nor the absence of
established order
that made them bold,
daring, capable
of untold bravery,
inventiveness, endurance.
I'm not sure it
was anything less than
this uninterrupted
eloquence
of sky.
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