Poems by Dan Cardoza

A Forest is a Castle

by Dan Cardoza

From Canary Fall 2018

Dan lives a few short blocks from the American River in the Sacramento River Watershed.

The hill behind my house is my best
kept delusion with its colossal green
castle caught in the throat of forest
that never swallows. I walk in feet
of silent hoofs of thatch & rusty
autumn feathers. Then acorns pop like
red knuckles, first one then

two, then a whole fist full––but all is
forgiven in my forest. I can hear the
shadows call for night, first softly,
then in the melody of a breeze, then
their singing in the wind.

It doesn’t
really matter that I curl up next to a
large oak trunk, with its back of stiff,
& confess just the way I do at church,
though today I’m an atheist in a
cathedral a mad man architect built in
just six days. Darkness begins its tug
of blanket, all

shadows through the valley floor, then
hills, over scrub and brush, then over
darkening trees and finally over me as
I begin the fall of sleep with a
darkening blanket at my feet. I
awaken in a dream swallowed in a
dream, by squint of a

sticky green star wedged in a branch,
in the highest of bows in a cedar tree,
at the very tip of top. I open my gills,
in a stream of sleep, before the swell
of river. Politely I request the stars I
keep in my frosted glass boxes of
window pane, to

please keep my secret or risk the not
letting out again. And to keep my
forest pristine to enter once again.
Then I am enveloped in the scent of
water & salt where my delusions
become dreams, into the sleep of
night.

© Dan Cardoza

My Red-Tailed Hawk

by Dan Cardoza

From Canary Summer 2019

I have only seen a glimpse of him
now and again.

The fat dove’s distraction is why he comes
& in a feathery puff the dove is gone.

He flies like a scythe through the deepest blue furrows
in my backyard just above the trees.

Zeus would have worshiped him.

I spot him midday in the higher branches in the large
valley oak tree that covers half my yard
with its crooked summer shadows.

He glances down at what he can see of me
disdaining the gravity I am content to live with.

But mostly he has no thoughts;
his skull's religion is silence.

If I were small enough, it's my winged heart
he would be savoring.

Previously published in Nature Writing