the black

smoke chased

 

Jessica Bundschuh

—After W.B. Yeats: “A tree there is that from its topmost
bough /Is half all glittering flame and half all green...”
(“Vacillation,” 1932)

 

Smoke chasers first wore football padding in ’39.

They landed by parachute, avoiding ragged peaks,

foaming streams, spear-like treetops to break their falls:

 

their ripcords automatic, their canopies slotted,

like parachutes gripped by children in gymnasiums,

mushroom-shaped, they run below a feather of nylon,

 

a cloud of light above them. This glittering trunk

overlooked by smoke chasers, proud as rosewood

split for a writing desk, remains, nonetheless.

 

As a refrain makes music of what borders it—

so says Yeats anyway, ‘let all things pass away,’

—the boughs stir, numb to black lapping at their base.

 

If that indolent smoke could lift, like the plume

of an old locomotive, its engine gasping,

only fire would remain, consuming what it renews

 

in a flurry of lush, quaking aspen, juniper, and sage,

braided gold and flayed flat, like raw cowhide

in the parable of an elder priest who hung God

 

here, in the warm crook of the burning tree—

fragrant rosewood salvaged for a poet

—singing out a black-plaited history of fire.

 

The Meadow brush cleared

 

Jessica Bundschuh

—After Walt Whitman: “Make the Works—
Make full-blooded, rich, flush, natural
works...indestructibles...” (fragment, 1856)

 

I was first born at the edge

of the MacGregor Ranch—

not as a newborn calf dropped

in tall grass, afterbirth trailing,

nor as a vertical delivery, landing

squat beneath a heated lamp,

but as a flayed, horizontal cleaving

on the Western plain, across, over

that labored scrawl of Whitman

seized from his rosewood desk:

“Make the Works,” make, make:

 

Make the birth plough,

 the horizon well,

  the Black Angus graze,

  the meadow hay.

Make the land lure, the cow milk,

 the flush grain feed,

  and the calf-walk steady—

make the poet, please.

 

the dry kindling collected

 

Jessica Bundschuh

—After Robert Frost: “We enjoy the straight
crookedness of a good walking stick.”

(“The Figure a Poem Makes,” 1939)

 

Together we gather sticks—

incurably en route:

a matchless campfire

with kindling in hand,

our storm-tossed twigs

stowed in fear of thieves

trailing us to school.

Afternoons we tend

our stocked stores

sustaining no fire;

our joy is disrupting

the weight of loss

with a dizzying frenzy

of tender accumulation.

No kin to a stockpile

of scrapped flotsam,

these sticks skip along

a makeshift underground,

one hideout to the next,

spared the upright glory

of celebratory bonfires;

such ignitable branches

fork a crooked pilgrimage—

tinder for this tethered world.

 

the u.s. route 36
to estes park travelled

 

Jessica Bundschuh

—After Patrick Kavanagh: “I am king / Of banks
and stones and every blooming thing.”

(“Inniskeen Road: July Evening,” 1936)

 

The Stanley Steamers go by in twos and threes—

There’s a dance in the white hotel ballroom tonight,

And there arrives Roosevelt by mountain train

To the wink-and-elbow delight of trapped locals.

Half-past eight and the winding road cut deep

Into the granite crags of Big Thompson Canyon,

Strews no falling rock in the path of woman or elk,

An old cottonwood leaching secrecies of river water.

 

I have what every car-sick child hates in spite

Of all the well-intended whisperings of grown-ups.

Ah, the Arapaho first knew the sacred freedom

Of being tribal chief to the glacially-carved valley.

A road, a mile of uncharted territory, I am queen

Of blue columbines and springs and every fiery thing.