Poems by Thomas Mitchell
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Stormwatch
by Thomas Mitchell
From Canary Fall 2020
Thomas lives on the Southern Oregon coast at the juncture of the Coos River basin and the Pacific, spending a great deal of time hiking the mountain trails and strolling along the beaches.
I think there’s a storm coming in, wind blowing from the South,
leaves rattling on the sumac as the morning gathers restlessly
in my backyard. A pair of stellar jays visits the pyracantha bushes
three feet from my window. Soon they grow tipsy from the fermented
orange berries. With me it’s vodka. I know there needs to be a change.
I’m hoping to be surprised tomorrow by I don’t know what.
Not by the new moon that everyone believes will bring hope,
that tilts ever-so slightly toward Jupiter, bathing in its own lustrous
light, and not my own fear which comes and goes, sometimes
with Mozart’s music or more lately, Leonard Cohen singing
So Long Marianne. What could it be, this change, but to awaken
to sunlight dancing on the window shade, and to understand
that the ways of the world are no more complicated than a shift
in the wind? It’s beginning to rain and the stellar jays lift their wings,
then fly away.
© Thomas Mitchell
Winter and the Tit Mouse
by Thomas Mitchell
No symphony today. Only undiscovered wrens
hidden in the snowy brambles, the only sound…
the tic tic of a fly away branch tapping
against a jack pine. Is this how the ancients
measured time, listening to the pulse of Nature
in all her various forms? Maybe the movement
of clouds is more calculating than we ever suspected,
the graceful swaying of aspens more accurate
than the swing of a clock’s pendulum.
I’ve made this path by myself plodding crookedly
through a field of whiteness, veering east and west,
instructed by the random occasions of heart,
a palpitating stream, a tit mouse scrambling
over an icy floe. And even in the cold, dawn peeks
over the mountains.
© Thomas Mitchell