Poems by Gail Rudd Entrekin

Autumn at Work

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary Fall 2023

Gail lives amid the Coastal Range east of San Francisco Bay in the San Pablo Bay watershed just above San Pablo Creek on lands of the Chocheno and Karkin Ohlone people.

She’s a wild woman. Leaves in
her hair. Like she just got up from some
crazy roll in the hay. No one sorts
her closets or her kitchen drawers
and you can’t find a damn thing
at her house: silver buckles hanging
from kitchen cupboards, satin shoes in
the potted plants, summer zucchinis
spoiling from the chandeliers. She’s
been out in the studio throwing paint
at the trees in a frenzy of inspiration.
Look at that scarlet one all flecked
with verdigris, those ochre heads
throwing themselves around in the wind
in front of that lapis lazuli sky. She’s
got deadlines and the pressure is beginning
to get to her. So many leaves, so little time.
That creep Winter is on the road
with his fancy suit and critic’s eye,
getting ready to pan her work
with his icy wit and slick finality,
always has to have the last word.

Reprinted from the author’s new collection Walking Each Other Home

© Gail Rudd Entrekin

Blue Whales

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary December 2008

Blue whales are out there somewhere,
six thousand of the hundreds of thousands
that once roamed the planet's seas.
Now separated from each other
by thousands of miles, they moan their loneliness
four octaves below middle C, so low, so slow,
we humans cannot even hear. But on our ocean liners
and in our lighthouse kitchens, the cutlery jangles on the table,
the glass pane vibrates in its frame, and we know
something nearby is crying out in need.
Two thousand miles away, they can be heard
and answered, the loudest sound made by a living thing,
and we don't know what it says, but only that,
speeded up ten times, what we hear is a long, blue,
unearthly note, a gurgle so deep
we slip down into our own lostness,
grateful that they are carrying for us
something bigger than we could hold.

© Gail Rudd Entrekin

Broken

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary Winter 2012-13

"Too many things are happening for even big hearts to hold."
– Anne Sexton

Broken hearts, broken bones, broken vows, promises, records,
broken noses, broken dreams, broken arrows, broken
bottles in the alley where the street guy throws his anger,
broken oil tank on the Valdez, broken wings, broken feathers,
black seas, rising seas, broken ice shelf, white bears falling
in the ocean, broken migration routes, swimming bears,
stranded elk, wrong side of the highway, wrong side
of the dam, broken salmon stair, broken fishermen,
dying towns, giving up, giving in, broken immune systems,
cancer cancer cancer, diabetes, new diseases, polyurethane
melting in the sun, give it to the kids to drink, microwave it
into broken eggs, fork them up, broken bird eggs
where the acid rain, broken atoms rushing fusion
reactions long tube blowing, broken watch
throw it in the basket, leave it
with the other trash, buy
another buy another
buy another –

© Gail Rudd Entrekin

Drought on the Navajo Reservation

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary Summer 2022

Three roan mares showed up outside our trailer
heads down, ribs protruding like carcasses, and
while we watched from the doorway, they slumped
down, one leg at a time, two of them dead
by the time they hit the ground. We went out
with a bucket of water, Lincoln and me, and
we set it down by the last mare standing and
she let us come, had come to us, we figured,
where they never come, like they were almost
spirits and had to trust us now, and she slowly
moved her head and drank.
Ten gallons a day
they need, and there hasn’t been but a drop or two
in 15 years, the ground like rock, cracked, the soil
snatched away into the air, nothing green to eat
and not even much that’s brown, and still we live here,
hauling water for coins from the watering station.

No one on the rez that hasn’t seen them dead.
They’ve got to forage thirty pounds a day,
hundreds of thousands of them sharing this pitiless land.

We used to see them blow out like the wind, their manes
whipping, their fine legs pounding,
but now
their mouths are full of mud, so weak they stick in
at the watering hole, and they just lie down
and die.
These sacred horses were here before the People came.
We go out every day to meet them. We bring our wagon,
fill the old deserted troughs, and they come right to us, their
big eyes full of dust and flies hovering and they don’t understand
what it is that’s happening to them, they just lower their heads
and drink.

© Gail Rudd Entrekin

Leave Taking

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary Spring 2014

Everywhere the planet
is pulling in her generous green
folding it up forever in the vast trunk
of history. She is taking down the curtains
of rain and giving them away to someone
in another dimension who will treat
them gently. She is rolling up
the atmosphere with its cigarette holes
and moth-eaten diatribes and when
she has packed her bags and slammed
the door and left us looking at each other
in silent shame, like bad children,
we will say, We didn’t do it.
It was someone else.

© Gail Rudd Entrekin

Mountain House Morning

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary Winter 2023-24

We come out to the living room in our robes
and the whole room is incandescent white.
Outside the picture window on the landing
the entire sky comes down leisurely and silent –
like when the plum trees all bloomed at once
filling the house with lacy white light, all the tiny
petals wandering downward in their steadfast
devotion to the earth –
But this bloom of white stars,
sifts down heavy and slow, each adding its tiny weight
to the burden on the ground, the fence, each narrow
branch, the top hats on the garbage cans, and the dog
banging now through her door and shaking the melt
onto our feet. The children awake and come down
to the landing and we all stand at the window watching,
smitten to silence by this slow tumbling dance

Respiring

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary Spring 2017

The planet moves ponderously, turning me
into the sun my body craves, opens to receive
its heat. I breathe in air that’s passed perhaps
through the lungs of a neighbor’s dog,
the postman, the Vietnamese women at the nail salon
who breathe these atoms in and out. Everyone
who’s ever lived has taken in, used up, exhaled
reconfigured the particles that make this air.
I fill my lungs, take what I breathe into my blood,
sigh out the other parts for the maple tree,
sycamore, rhododendron, who wait
for my rejected molecules, green up, flower
or color or seed, and blow back the parts
I need.

Something Coming

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary Fall 2010

We are beginning to understand something
of what is coming, to go beyond sensing a shadow
in the woods watching us, and to see it take shape,
see it coming toward us across a field, zigzagging
as it does, now standing idle and watching the sky,
now heading directly for us at a trot. And realizing
that we are seen, that it will find us no matter
what we do, we are slowing down.
We are
standing very still hoping to blend with the waving
greens of this raw springtime, to stay upwind
of it as warmer breezes pick up and buffet the leaves,
the grasses, tossing everything in a moving salad
of life; we sway on our legs, trying to move with the air
that surrounds us, and we stop thinking of what is around
the next bend in the path, stop planning our next
escape route, and begin to merge with the moment;
we have slipped into a painting by Van Gogh;
something is coming again across the fields and we
are open as sunflowers in full bloom
to these last moments on the earth.

The Gaia Theory

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

From Canary Spring 2015

Earth is a being. It shrinks and swells, rearranges its shores
nipping back on an island here, a cliff top there, subtracting
two yards of real estate from an Ohio yard, depositing that much
sand on Canadian shores. Shaking its skin like a wet dog, whole
forests tumble, winds lift, howl, spool, fling houses and cows
into neighbors’ pastures; lava burns to the surface, slips
down and across the roads, leaving its black trails; water
falls from the sky, some of it sinking deep under the surface
where it forms a tap-able layer; the rest, turning into a lighter,
thinner form, rises back up, clusters in myriad shapes and colors
around the planet, providing a blanket that holds it all in, prevents
invading heat from wrecking everything. And while this magic
is performed, this vast unfathomable system of checks and balances,
creatures made of the planet arise, respire, eat each other
and whatever else they fancy, fall back into the mulch.
And the planet, all this time, turns reliably, day upon night,
hurtles through infinite space, imperturbable, so far.