Poems by Grant Jones
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The Animals Are Talking
by Grant Jones
Grant lives in the prairie of North Central Washington where orchards and foothills intermingle at the mouth of the canyon of the Little Mosquito, one of the tributary watersheds that feeds the Okanogan River basin of the Columbia River Big Bend.
Walk out past the barn to the spillway,
where Bobcat crossed the creek last night;
her tracks curve through the aspen glade,
skirting past the homestead iron pile,
then veer up the dugroad grade
we restored to the pocket-bench
on the shoulder of our Pack Pony Hill,
up where we carried that loveseat and two chairs
to watch the sunsets that shimmer out the river bend;
that was last summer before those talking heads
started lying like scheming magpies.
Bobcat’s prints were close spaced
as she walked out there slow in the moonlight,
driving crazy our dog “Wolf,” to growl and bark,
to guard the house where we slept
on our hot-granite slab by the fire
under a hand-tied comforter;
Bobcat was tracking a snowshoe rabbit
who foraged on little Saskatoon buds,
fir needles and stems of Sagebrush Buttercups,
under this long December Cold Moon.
America was shuddering in its longest night.
Now follow my tractor tracks
behind the house up the Pine Trail Road
where mulleins lie like shadows under the snow,
felled by Chong-hui’s razor sickle,
next to the clumps of yarrow and lupine
where bluebells and spring beauties
poke through the snow, waiting.
Coyote came down off Watch-over-us Hill,
stood where you’re standing, thinking
Everything is connected, though most
of you seem tied only to each other,
and fewer and fewer to Earth.
Coyote Springs, Mouth of the Canyon of the Mosquito at Ellis-Forde
12/24/2016
© Grant Jones