Poems by David Axelrod
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After Strife
by David Axelrod
David has lived for 30 years in the Columbia River Watershed in the upper reaches of the Grande Ronde River between the Blue and Wallowa Mountains. His house is on the steep south bank of an abandoned meander, where the river flowed at the end of the last ice age.
I didn't expect this
quiet, these rows of empty
boxcars, rails and sidings
overgrown by thickets of dogwood.
At far crossings, debris fires
billow—sporadic and strange,
set ablaze by whom?
And why?
In the valley, fog rimes
the galleries of cottonwoods
along the river, limbs glimmering
old moon, new or full,
and once or twice each day,
whatever a day is
in this afterlife, a random wave
passes through barren
crowns of trees and dusts
the sere grass in hoar.
No center holds. Peripheries only
and a gradual blurring—
what was that, scuttling
sideways along a sagging wire,
its wings or shoulders hunched,
a lump of quills or damp fur?
A white horse takes a roll
in snow, shudders as it stands,
then disappears into a fold.
And far deeper, in the remote
and unplanted tillages,
dry thistles scrape against
the plowshare
where it pulled to a halt.
© David Axelrod
As the Mountain Dreams It
by David Axelrod
From Canary Summer 2018
There it is.
Or a glimpse of it anyway,
rising above the intervening ridge.
The dome of Glacier Peak
and the headwaters of five rivers
we live alongside of
in all our feckless shambles and uproar,
patrol cars speeding toward a lit-up rental
and raised voices late at night.
Johnnies-come-lately
we're the ghosts of a language
we can't understand.
At dusk, the mountain divides
shadows cast by its north-facing cirque
and alpenglow lifting along its southwest flank.
There it is. The world
as the mountain dreams it,
going on after as it went on before us—
spikes of elk sedge and calf brain
poking through duff at the edge of its July snowbanks,
a whitebark pinenut splitting its seed coat
centuries later inside a nutcracker's hoard,
the fascicles unfurling five elegant seed-leaves,
a little asterisk on a mountain that lost its glacier.
If people are inside some spectral order,
does it matter how
or how long we abide here?
Does whatever the mountain dreams end
without us,
if we wake in a world set afire?
© David Axelrod
Drūgath
by David Axelrod
From Canary Fall 2018
—old word and older fear,
the low water, the autumn fast
and third month of famine,
drought deepening like dust
on the pack trail alongside
Bear Creek, where water is
scarcely a dream of itself today
in transit from tarn to empty
ditch that irrigated alfalfa
when snow still fell in winter.
Below you, down deep,
sifting through gravels,
and deeper, seeping along
fractured fault-blocks,
dikes, and rills, the old water,
hydraulic memory of earth,
seeks the bottom of time.
© David Axelrod
The Diplomatic Envoy
by David Axelrod
From Canary Fall 2018
It's odd to find a man made of sticks,
not a man exactly, but not the revered
insect either—the walking stick—
ambling along my street un-camouflaged,
an uprooted refugee from the assailed,
slow-moving forests, a man like me,
gnarly leg- and arm-boughs,
a blunt lopped-off stub for a head,
hair roots shedding clumps of dirt,
his wounds armored by scales of bark.
Welcome, arboreal guest, just-arrived,
wide-eyed, pecker-hole ears alert,
tongue—just a tender leaf—tasting air
the way children open their mouths
in summer, catching drops of rain.
His is an original mind at play
in parks, vining up monkey bars
and brick walls, waving halloos
to the awestruck kindergarteners
passing in files of two, holding hands.
My friend, the green man avows
the morning of the world secured
and covenant renewed. In full flower,
clouds of pollen stream toward him.
I swear to protect this open-to-all
eagerness, this true bonhomie,
this readiness to find comrades
and hold us close. I too wish to be
that forthright friend and guide him
past the wary, past firewood gatherers,
avoiding knots of phlegmatic bullies
outside arcades, who light up and smoke
in silence, feigning their disinterest
in such guileless, out-of-place ardor.
Given even half a chance, they would
sneak up behind him and club my friend
with the business end of an ax,
so loath are they to allow this gangling,
wise envoy from the great forest councils
to deliver the dispatch entrusted to him—
Brother, he whispers across my pillow,
Let there be no more diseasèd nature,
no ugly no broken no disordered or shamed.
© David Axelrod
The Thirst-Bag
by David Axelrod
From Canary Fall 2018
In the end, water too
had become just
another scant standard
whereby we reckoned loss.
She led the way across ridges
into parching winds,
a rain of sparks and hot ash,
through blackened stands of pine
and smoldering wind-fall.
Adrift in manias, we brooded,
old feuds billowing ill-will
and baleful mind.
How could we trust
the world-soul to thirst still
for dry skin and wish to soak it
all the way through?
Listen, she said. A cold
astringent psalm
trickled across cobbles.
She pointed up the gulch,
where the north fork
once joined the south,
at a gravel bar covered
in puzzlegrass and tears
seeping from a cutbank—the past
surfacing in the present.
She pulled me down beside her,
the air sweet with the aroma
of buckbrush and mint.
We filled the thirst-bag
with wonder, watched it swell,
full of losses yet to be borne.
© David Axelrod