Poems by P.V. Beck
Archives: by Issue | by Author Name
Frozen Apples
by P.V. Beck
P.V. lives among the ponderosa, juniper, and piñon high in a valley carved out of the San Cristobal Creek watershed where she can look out across the Rio Grande to where the Creek ends its journey in the high desert.
In the late afternoon the sky shifted and snow began to fall
all night and all day, silent humming snow.
It is dark when the sky clears and Fox paws her way out of her den,
the stars blink and burn.
Fox plunges from pocket to pocket of fresh deer tracks looking for signs,
gulping snow, rasping barks of frustration.
The tip of Fox’s tail is dipped in absolute zero,
a fading comet zig-zagging through the forest.
Buried in powder she is a ghost of glacial air;
her ears and whiskers twitch their sonar
but the only pulse in the night comes from galaxies light years away.
In an old apple orchard of half-buried trees Fox surrenders,
a ball of fur in a hollowed out cradle of snow.
A great-horned owl calls, frozen apples dangle low,
Fox scratches at the branches and sweet apples fall.
The great-horned owl flies, the starry river flows,
Fox crosses the meadow with an apple in her mouth
casting her shadow on the moon blue snow.
© P.V. Beck
In the Deep Midwinter
by P.V. Beck
The earth stalled on the longest night of the year
creaking at its old poles, a ball of ice too tired to roll over.
Deep below zero Fox exhales ice, her fur as thick as snow.
She hears no fibrillating heart beats, no scurl or scurry,
only a silent frozen scape waiting for a pulse of heat.
Bears in their caves, mice in their tunnels,
deep and hushed and ancient the heart slows to the pace of creation.
Fox pushes through snow to the emptiness where the pond used to be,
a cat-tailed moonscape, a tangle of elk hairs locked in ice.
A winter that escapes itself in sleep and slowly awakens is what we cherish,
that moment something moves in the corner of the eye,
a flurry or flight,
the folding over of cusp and quarry on that longest night.
© P.V. Beck
Migrations
by P.V. Beck
From Canary Fall 2018
If there are patters and whispers secreted to all but Fox
and halos of quanta invisible to all but migrating flocks of birds—
what do we know of prairies and rivers that run to the sea?
The bombast of human brains fills estuaries to build ports and cities,
turns rivers into highways and kettle ponds into perfect rows of corn.
Our lurid inventions and crisscrossing contrails grab force fields and twist them into
knots tearing apart the riverine current in the sky where geese flail in neon twilights.
When Fox flounders out of the mud at the edge of the pond she erases the moon.
A lone frog emerges from the ripples and sings to a ceaseless desire,
while our poor souls emptied of wonder
wander lost between the teeming alluvial plains
and the palms of our hands that used to tell stories.
© P.V. Beck
This Old Earth
by P.V. Beck
From Canary Fall 2018
Fox knows something’s afoot.
The leaves change two weeks early and drop without color,
spiders the size of crabs appear out of nowhere
hooking their tapestry of empty corpses into the forks of trees.
Forgetful skies pass through odd phases in a ragged light,
chorus frogs sing one night and are gone the next
and there is dread in the shallow trickle at the confluence of streams.
Like the old rhythms that once ran with abandon
flocks of sparrows still twirl in a swirl of falling leaves
and there are still raucous evenings when flocks of red-wing blackbirds
settle down among the cattails.
But in those interlocking dances rings a doom Fox faintly hears,
the incantations of a stranger who at the season’s turn
comes knocking whimsy from the music of the spheres.
© P.V. Beck
Trap
by P.V. Beck
The rising sun filters through junipers into a clearing
warming Fox on a long trek back to her den.
She circles a patch of sunlight,
pushing her snout like a mine sweeper
over boot lugs and tire tracks indented in frozen mud,
taking in the linger of human sweat, bacon drippings and dried blood.
The trap is hidden under a scraggily chamisa bush,
it’s shiny steel jaws snapped closed on the neck of an ermine,
thick sleek fur in winter white.
Rictus Rictus Rictus call the crows.
A clump of sage has snagged the trapper’s greasy glove
frozen and crumpled in the brush like a dead animal.
Fox sniffs the leather and pees on it.
Rictus Rictus Rictus
A silver plumed tail with a black tip
Fox trots away from the clearing
the mocking of the crows
and the grieving of the morning sun.
© P.V. Beck