Poems by Scott Lowery
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Cafe Girl Meets Butterfly III
--after two pieces in a student art show, pen and ink by Echo Henn and cut paper by Dani Loomis
by Scott Lowery
From Canary Fall 2023
Scott lives under a canopy of urban hardwoods near bluffs that overlook the Menominee River as it runs toward Lake Michigan about five miles to the east. This river valley, longtime homeland of Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee people, is now recovering from two centuries of extractive industrial land use.
These cafe chairs knife at her shoulder blades—
they're made for pain, she knows,
then thinks of that butterfly this morning,
its ornate veins traced, sliced, spread flat
in the decorator's pattern-book
on a field of impossible stems and leaves.
She squints to picture its perfect niche
among her condo's dense ecology—
the half-bath linen? The breakfast china?
With a neon nail, she'd like to trace
those twining, razored curves
or coolly flex each cardstock wing,
admiring the helpful absence of tint so that
it's all outline: mostly void, a doily
of lobes and capillaries, tessellated
like teardrops. Blink.
For a single wing-flap
moment, she sees its paisley pattern
slapped on a rock wall: a living silkscreen,
inked in frack slurry, oil spill, firestorm.
No, absolutely not. She jabs her phone,
then one last gulp of chai as she uncurls,
tugs at her beret, late for yoga.
Across the street behind her, a man
lies prone beneath church windows,
swaddled in moist blankets. Pupal stage
of an unknown species, he's in her
blind spot, also known as the actual world—
crowd-sourced flora and fauna, streaming live.
Originally published in the author's collection, Mutual Life, 2023
© Scott Lowery
Inheritance
by Scott Lowery
From Canary Fall 2023
Late summer has smoldered into September, baking the long grasses to a weightless, golden glow.
Brass plaques shimmer at the Badlands overlook, hot enough to raise blisters,
and dirt-blue haze hangs like a sour mood on the endless ranches, darkening the Black Hills,
blurring the Bighorns.
When we re-fuel, the breeze that skids across the blacktop brings a quick whiff of evening campfires.
Still, it takes all day under an absent sky to sink in: ever since Sioux Falls, the West's been burning.
By the time the Clark Fork leads the highway up toward switchbacks thick with bone-dry
Douglas Fir,
the gap-toothed Absaroka peaks are completely gone, though we sense their gray hulks looming like
absent gods
above our ant-line crawl through russet fields: late vacationers, sales reps, hell-bent big rigs hauling
the national grocery list.
Windows rolled-up, tuned to our own devices, but our eyes redden and sting just the same.
Finally, up and over: the sudden cold of Snoqualmie Pass, then three lanes of accelerating descent—
at the bottom, you can almost hear the hiss of hot metal quenched in the slosh and swell of
Puget Sound,
the clank of the working harbor, the moon-pull on the kelp beds, the click of round stone.
Next morning, our West Seattle host has swept her tidy deck overlooking the fog-bound ferry docks.
"This ash", she says, "is all over everything—that's what's on your car."
At the sidewalk, we see that it's still floating down, in light white flakes of nearly nothing,
casual as a shrug,
rich in pick-your-own meaning: consequence of excess, remains of passion or disaster,
the precursor of dust.
Bits of former bark or duff, drifting down on lakeside bike paths, the barbwire car lots of
Rainier Valley,
swirling like tiny white moths in updrafts around the downtown tech towers,
flecking plastic drink-bottles stacked in their manic colors behind idling delivery trucks,
graying the ginger dreads that dance around a young hobo's face by the freeway ramp.
Unbidden, a scene comes to mind in black-and-white, from one of those third-string Twilight Zones:
in tuxes and gowns, oozing greed, adult children have gathered to bicker and toast their
father's death,
only to learn of their disinheritance from the falling, incinerated scraps of the old man's money.
On our fender, what's left of last night's rain turns to a slurry of ash-fall and insect parts.
Beyond Alki Point, rows of shipyard cranes raise their dinosaur heads above the stippled
lead of the bay,
dimly lit by a red briquette of sun in a low sky of damp plaster, and the mercury rising again.
Originally published in the author's collection, Mutual Life, 2023
© Scott Lowery
Pandemic Jubilate
after Christopher Smart
by Scott Lowery
From Canary Fall 2023
For I will consider my K-94 covid mask.
For it faithfully cleanses my portion of the common air.
For it is amiable, draped from the turn signal, ready for work.
For it is as easily kept in my hip pocket, and may fold and unfold, tirelessly.
For being featherweight yet unafraid in the Valley of Death, it is saintly if not Godly.
For its basic black patina is suitably somber, yet melds with any wardrobe.
For it stays crisp and dry in winter, unlike its droopy cloth cousins.
For its calibrated tug behind my ears can put me in the moment.
For its paper membrane is both fragile and tough, like any living thing.
For its cupped muzzle reminds me of the four-legged ones, that we are all related.
For it can be used to scare possums and starlings.
For it conjures the pluck of Mardi Gras, singing Jocomo Fee Nah Nay!
For it can be pulled up with a dark flourish for Walter Mitty moments at the ATM.
For its filter can be imagined as a gill, baleen or snorkel.
For thereby I can swim safely through turbulent days and weeks.
For it is an early detector of coffee breath.
For wearing it reminds me to voice charitable thoughts and hold others unspoken.
For wearing it amplifies both measure and meter of my breath.
For No Peace, No Justice! can project loud and clear through its porous shell.
For inside it there is a quiet cloister, the murmur of prayer.
For the partial eclipse it visits on the moon of the human face is often stunning to see.
For it brings an unseen smile from the food coop cashier with the pale blue hair and startled eyes.
For it wishes we really were all in this together.
For talking within it is like speaking into a tin can attached to a string attached to my previous self,
listening from elsewhere.
For when it is deployed and I am enveloped, my heart steadies, and slows, and feels some kind of
peace.
Originally published in the author's collection, Mutual Life, 2023
© Scott Lowery