Poems by John Holbrook

Petition to Common Sense

by John Holbrook

From Canary Summer 2018

John lives in Missoula, Montana, along the Clark Fork River near its confluences with the Bitterroot and Blackfoot Rivers and at the of convergence of five mountain ranges in western Montana, all part of the extensive drainages of the Columbia River watershed.

Something tumbling on the road
makes the woman leave her small car rocking,
door ajar, emergency on. Car lengths back
she runs. Where a pickup slows,
a painted turtle lies, low keeled,
olive-green, patterned carapace
split where red spills. More like
a melon or soft clay bowl,
its eye fixed in one direction,
her mind reels.

Clouds of dust draw nearer—
glaring traffic everywhere
in waves of buckling August heat.
Leg stripped to bone, a flimsy claw
her finger lifts, she moves
from nausea to resolve, places
the lightly sculpted shell on grass
near dry asparagus
seeding a ditch bank path.

Purpose has no place where she stands.
Fields, wind, chrome, flash in
and out of view—and something else,
not cruel, wrong or fault,
and not without loss.
It wasn’t fear of finding
nothing inside herself
that made her stop,
cradle in a palm
the softly leathered belly plate.
As she pulled at tufts of grass,
as flies began to hover the loss,
she could only guess
if wilderness ever listened.

In the gathering dark,
slow lane home, growing weary
of tripping over sentimental guilt,
she felt, beyond what anybody
made of it, this sudden
death in life, bad break,
touched with light.