Poems by Joan Gibb Engel

Clouds

by Joan Gibb Engel

From Canary Spring 2022

Sadly Joan died a few days before this issue went to press. Her husband asked us to use the following:

"In the last weeks of her life Joan looked out each morning at the little garden of native Sonoran Desert plants that she had gathered in the rear of her adobe home in mid-town Tucson, and told her friends that seeing them not only connected her to the surrounding desert ecosystem, but brought back to life the Indiana Dunes where, following in the steps of pioneering field naturalist Henry Cowles, she learned the elements of ecological science and began to write her poetic ecological vision of the world."

You have to watch them
more carefully than your two-year olds
you can’t be turning away
to add a line to the poem you’ve written
or look up the spelling of ‘evanescent’
they won’t be the same when you return
chances are you’ll want to nail
that one in front, the way it glows
like a sea gull over water—
but leave your looking for an instant
pause to delete a comma
check the meaning of ‘senescence’
and its bright has turned to brooding
rain is falling in the distance

© Joan Gibb Engel

Enclosure

by Joan Gibb Engel

From Canary Summer 2021

she was my moon mine and luna moths’
mine and hoot owls’

mine, muse of firefly daughters
playing peekaboo on humid summer nights

she belonged to desert saguaros
whose hosannas are melon-fragrant cups

and was the treasure of needled pine
their flung arms stilled in her presence

my moon flamed jackrabbit ears
signaled from mountain lions’ all-seeing orbs

men and women too sought to autograph my moon
kiss her radiant skirts with corrugated boots

I gave her away to those windowed helmets

who didn’t know she wasn’t meant to be given
who didn’t know she was theirs and always had been

theirs like the follow and flow of corpuscles
theirs to share the way that water pools

how generous my moon beaming gratis
Earth in all its azure beauty

parading her own nocturnal peace
as dust and broken rock

© Joan Gibb Engel

Maple

by Joan Gibb Engel

From Canary Fall 2020

In my presumption of powers supernal
it would have gone three years ago,
its twin poles rasped with hand saw
or pinched with steel-jawed clippers.

It shot from the edge of the cliff
too near a pair of lofty pines, disturbing
their solitary magnificence, interrupting
the scenic plane of sky and water.

Long before it hoisted those few ragged flags
that held on despite wind and spray,
I would have leveled my almighty sword
and been well pleased.

Now, in the spring of its adolescence,
I see it clustered with rust-washed leaves,
umbrella tufts on slender threads
graceful beyond understanding

(more than I would have drawn
yet enough and not too many).

Red-Breasted Nuthatch

by Joan Gibb Engel

From Canary Fall 2020

Remember?
I would like to think we each remember
the way that day the pines saluted winter’s coming
with upright silent stance

that day you came, small fragment torn from nut-blue
fragrant hollows, came alone,
without your bugle-corps contingent
brave beyond good sense, harking back
to covenantal tales of unspoiled garden,
of women, men and animals with tongue in common
or it may have been that, simply striking out as heroes do,
you saw two needy creatures like yourself preparing
for the cold you knew was coming, one, the shorter,
pushing logs uphill, the other tall with acrobatic wing
cleaving them in pieces sized for burning.

The noise my husband’s chopping made!
And still you flew straight out of lowered sky,
teetered once then stood twig-legged on wheelbarrow’s
rusty rim, red-breasted feathered bomb
of consciousness, patently impatient, as if,
seeing our cottage down below, you decided
on the moment to stop in but had a hundred things
to do by sunset, and so if tea were coming,
make it quick.

How did you know I had—how did I know to have—
seeds stashed inside my blue-jeans pocket?
and the way you chose among a handful,
wiped your bill across my palm, scattering
all but one—the largest—then flew off high and open-winged,
to return the way you left and ask for more.
Sometimes I saw you knock the seed against a tree trunk,
more often you were out of sight.

We named you Presto,
marveled, grateful beyond words
for your faithful coming at a whistled call
or when you heard from somewhere, far
inside leaf-scattered woods, a screen door open.

One time the UPS man brought a package,
drove his big brown truck far as the entrance of our path.
We greeted him together, you and I, and when he said,
astonished, “Lady, you have a bird perched on your shoulder,”
I acted unaffected. “Yes, I know.”
But oh, friend Presto, how I exulted.

My husband and I departed before the winter’s fury.
The asters were still blue, sweet everlastings lasting,
the bracken all but disappeared.
And there’d been flurries, talk of heavy snow to come.

I had to do it, Presto, yet I ached to think you listened
for my whistle that next morning and mornings after
in the frigid wet,
hate to think you learned a lesson, saw up close
clear proof of feckless egoistic human love.