David Chorlton
The Journey There
A burst of distant rain
hangs like an invitation from the sky
while here to there
is guesswork and a thirst
with power lines swaying and empty cans
shining at the edge
of the road. One moment the surroundings
are a blueprint for nowhere,
the next they bow in prayer
to what created them. Follow the fingerprint
left by the moon. Straight ahead
into space as open
as infinity, without any thought
of a destination to reach, just
the easy rolling of Earth
beneath the wheels. It’s easier
without a map to fill the tank
with hope and take
whatever comes. It might be sand,
it might be mud, it might
be rock that flowed
through time, it
might be voices in the air duct
crying out to know
which century they’re trapped in.
And there is a way to continue
on from here, another road
where cars are few and each one moves
at the pace of a fig beetle
crawling on creation’s open palm.
Message
Mail is a word on the wind here,
something spoken
far away
that takes a century to cross
the open land.
It’s language with a wolf’s
tail, a message from the past,
a warning that the soldiers
are on their way, a blessing
from the cloud
that holds most rain.
It’s what the pinyon pine
whispers to the juniper
in a drought, what
getting lost sounds like in storms
that cleanse the air of evil. Thunder
doesn’t understand
the finer points of language,
the interplay
of vowels and consonants
that dance when they should scream.
Listen: the moonlight in the canyon
can’t escape and
the silence cannot sleep.
Running Pines
Heat casts no shadow
between these low horizons where
the Earth is just a tree ring
in the universe.
Distant riders
chip away the silence
and an order has reached
the crossroads that the wind
must decide
which way to blow.
It has no face, it has
no home. It brings the sounds
of hoofbeats, of a trumpet
crying out that
soon
the moon will bleed. It will
be time for pinyon pines
to uproot themselves and run for
where not even
their own screams
can catch up with them.
David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978 when he moved from Vienna, Austria, with his wife. Born in Austria, he grew up in Manchester, close to rain and the northern English industrial zone. In his early 20s he went to live in Vienna and from there enjoyed many trips around Europe. In Arizona, he has grown ever more fascinated by the desert and its wildlife. As much as he loves the Southwest, he has strong memories of Vienna, and that city is the setting for his one work of fiction: The Taste of Fog, from Rain Mountain Press. Selected Poems, appeared in 2014 from FutureCycle Press, and The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant. A new book of older poems, Unmapped Worlds, will appear in 2021 from Future Cycle Press.