Mark Sanders

SELECTED POEMS

 

 

THE HORSE AS THE LETTER L

 

Love moves like something righteous and eternal

enveloped in summer’s blanche, air crackling

once sun recedes, and the sky ribboned

is a window pane a shot has pierced, the hole

the horse, that perfect circle of animal fenced by lightning

and the pasture is the thunder of ordinances that summon rain.

 

Love is that patient creature, wind tearing the mane

and tail, crepe fabric, and the strands are motion and evidence

the foundation and fortress of flesh stands firm.

   Let dirt or sleet welt the horse,

it does not imagine other places, the high spot where a river valley winds

through blind cliffs nor deep wet meadows where it wades,

nor does it remember shale slipping along slopes, when last it fell

 

and had to lift its bulk, the bit pinching its mouth.  It looks forward, always,

at the grass before it, toward the noise it may hear.

It will carry the burden, the clumsy rider; it will trod

warily the stony switchback or woods where what is wild hides

and waits, cleave the tall thick, breeze-bent reeds

as if parting a creek’s current. 

Let there always be a horse

to clarify the landscape of love, being what it is and nothing more,

true as oak, true as birds that lift and fall and sing

the one song they know by rote, it does not need to be pronounced

but is.

 

                                    for Kimberly

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​

HERE

 

Here.  Let me sweep your porch free of leaves,

send them off like the brats who haunt the neighborhood,

their parents plaintive in old anguish, forgetful.

Here, let me give you some comfort, like a blanket

across your lap, the chair hollow and soft.  I will tell you what you want to hear.

It is what you need—so many bitter pills to swallow

I may at least give you this minute sweetness.

 

Here, sugar.  Coat the walls of the house in brightness

so the sun goes blind.  So heaven’s darkness

finds an avenue it may drive at leisure,

revisiting all the favorite haunts, mapping destinations.

We have time.  We have yet to arrive. 

​

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​

CONEFLOWERS

​

As is our illness, label them—Rudbeckia,

black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat—and regard

their sun-dance in ditches, on hills rolling

not as a giant waking to morning’s exaltation, but merely as 

Echinacea, Ratibida, elk root.  Wind declares: 

What is the consolation of mystery?

Who needs sky?  The cloud’s heart?

​

Look, then, as bees might, sitting on spears

tipped not with blood but life

to bear home the greatest avowal.

The windmill world reckons its spin

and sends us ahead to call us onward

back, these many eyes bloomed to see us our way.

​

​

​

MIDNIGHT, WITH DOGS

​

Midnight and the puppies are out on the lawn

doing what puppies do before I settle in to sleep

what sleep may come, now I am old

and my bones, chambered into a congress of aches,

remind me sleep should be reserved for those

who have too much time on their hands.

​

An armadillo grubs the grass, and the puppies

are terrified of him, sightless thing it is,

oblivious to our nearness despite barking and my scolding

for silence.  Now I am old I long for quiet, and, yet

quiet is abrupt as thunder.  My wife is soundly asleep,

and whatever bedtime banter there may have been

 

has washed like leaves down the long drive we’ve traveled,

the storm being the thing I desire, that hullabaloo

to which I one day must become accustomed. 

You can’t write depressing stuff, she told me once,

years ago, and, well, ah well, that’s good advice from someone

old.  But it’s not depressing to be alive

 

at midnight, as puppies crap on the lawn,

watching a blind tank nose worms out of dirt,

or feeling wind wrapping warm about me before sleep. 

These are things to be missed when sleep comes,

human things:  the sound of one’s breathing

in the pause between speech, the rumble of the heart

 

to the fingertips, the air’s course through me.

Tonight, there’s a million stars in the sky I’ve counted,

each one special.  And tonight, stars fall,

two or three, upon which I have made my wishes—

to live long, to survive every hurt, and to love, like a big-hearted dog,

any twig handed me as if it is the world’s best thing.

​

​

 

KEEPING

​

            for Kimberly

​

​

Let me say, if I might, how beautiful you are this morning.

Fog exhales from the pond, and the sun oozes

like tea steeping in your cup.  Breeze, so faint, is the tear in your eye

you had not thought I noticed.  The porch swing rocks,

the chains murmur, and the hair brushing your face

—how should I describe it?—are hands that once held yours. 

Do you see?  You know your comforters.

​

Let me say, too, at the risk of clouds and cold shadows

felled from oaks, at the risk of interruption—cows across the road

lowing and farm trucks rumbling like sour stomachs

over the blacktop--loveliness endures, even in grief, lasts long.

Loss felt is never really loss but keeping.  On the lawn,

among the crepe myrtles or turk’s caps, sifting through lantana,

seated beside you now, insisting, like interjections

 

--blackbirds on fence wires, the road runner’s dogged whimper—

the impression of the loved walks, runs, sleeps

in all the familiar haunts, there in the orchard among figs

and pears, there and there, at the table and shed,

plainly in sight.  The world, so full of itself, indulgent,

does not need sorrow save to call to mind such occasions

when we bring back what is ours.  Let me say

 

the river runs regardless and we cross.  Hills and piney woods

referenced as points passed.  Mean miles from the coast

and the heart’s mouth and the mind’s deep sea

—because you are beautiful as the morning cannot be—

because you are beautiful in keeping,

this will be held in sipping silence, that the morning

is the cup and the tea, something everlasting, delicious.

​

​

​

THREE KINDS OF PLEASURE

 

1.

 

Nights standing in the backyard, Texas.

Beyond the fence, yaupon, sweet gum, white pine

congregate for midnight mass, and the coyote choir

circles around.  The dogs, my angels, sit at my heels,

worried for us all, the dark just the other side of light doused,

fireflies flickering, there, there, out.

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2.

​

The old days, driving a country highway or graveled backroad:

snowfall and cornfield stubble; black posts and REA poles

bearing the wind’s weight; the car heater unable to keep pace

as cold crept through window seals.  The kids wiped down frost

with coat sleeves, wrote their names and made hearts.

In a cold like that there was not so much to do but keep driving

ruts left by others who, though slugged down

in the slough and ice, got where they were going.

 

3.

 

It is a delectation to sit on the front porch, guitar I cannot play

across my lap though I strum a pleasant noise, or whistle

an old church song to the rhythm of my rocking.

Cattle low across the way near the neighbor’s pond;

our horses knock the feeder though they’ve just been fed.

Swallows chirp; a roadrunner whines like a puppy.

Cicadas, yard light’s hum coming on, leaf tipple on breeze.

I have brought them here to love them, dare even the rain fall.

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​

COUNTING HORSES

​

One, to see the horses still stand,

wind moving manes or sun tilting morning shadows

onto wires and posts enclosing the pasture;

to have them caught in moment and web,

early hum of birds lifting from oaks.

 

Two, to find them sound upon hooves,

no mare or gelding limping, not one with colic,

not one crone prone and immovable; but—

nod or toss of head, a foot drumming hard ground;

breath and fart and hack on dust in hay.

 

Three, because the world we roam is unsound,

storms brewing south and west and north,

daylight diminishing; ascensions and declensions,

switchbacks, and flats where water

cannot stand where it should.

 

Four, because that’s how counting works,

dimes made of our lovelies parceled out,

and deep things, down things,

sweet coins spent and spent again.

The coffee cup cast empty except of need.

 

Five, because, so long as the horses

are alive, all muscled and beautiful,

what remains fresh and true is grass

blue across morning fields, 

things yet as they should be,

 

perfect, permanent, unretractable.

​

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​

SITTING WITH OLD FRIENDS, WITH DARK BEER

​

Something like a dresser drawer opened,

and the curious societies of paper coming forward,

unfolding with yellowed news, tattered like hearts;

like old men crawling from a cab, suits frayed

at the cuffs, at the collars and lapels, the alumni of the forgotten.

Here the trinkets left by old folks, cufflinks and tiepins,

earrings that have lost their stones, the jewel

that was faith; decades buried under heavy snow

of jots, doodles, and scribbles, gray with burden;

or the off-key music from a box, the ballerina or pony

broken, the little hymn magnified upon itself into thousands

of mouths, the darling children of bloom

like finches and buntings and bees and wasps

singing for all their little warming hearts, lest we forget,

lest we remember anything but the pictures,

all black and white, perfect.

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​

EARLY MORNING ON FARM ROAD

​

Deer lie down in coastal grass

where horses, knee-deep and dreaming,

stand and nod then face in slow wakefulness

the fog that drifts and blazes with first sun.

Yellow mist, gold haloes crowning oaks and ash.

Barbed-wire strums with whirrings

of wren and finch, such little wheels,

and the country road, under still heavy dew,

lulls like a snake, so chilled it cannot move.

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​

THE CRANES, TEXAS JANUARY

​

I call my wife outdoors to have her listen,
to turn her ears upward, beyond the cloud-veiled
sky where the moon dances thin light,
to tell her, “Don’t hear the cars on the freeway—

it’s not the truck-rumble. It is and is not
the sirens.” She stands there, on deck
a rocking boat, wanting to please the captain
who would have her hear the inaudible.

Her eyes, so blue the day sky is envious,
fix blackly on me, her mouth poised on question
like a stone. But, she hears, after all.
                                                     January on the Gulf,
warm wind washing over us,
we stand chilled in the winter of those voices.

​

​

​

Beatitudes, June Dusk

​

Blessed is the horse, head bowed, in deep Bermuda,

pond frogs decreeing day’s end, egrets lifting

and falling like snow despite the warm breeze.

 

Blessed are his ears, shifting forward, back,

checking the approach of nothing,

blessed the tail brushing off nuisance,

and his eyes, soft as dusk, closing. 

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​

Why We Bought a Horse

 

After our boy died, the black mare

was necessary:  bugged-eyed, underfed,

ribs like lath.  We didn’t know

she was dangerous, her ears pinned flat

against her head.  As much a warning

 

as red flags on the beach

where Portuguese men-of-war land

their flotilla, the diamondback’s rattle,

or the siren’s wail as clouds fold

and wind bucks rooftops off.

 

Necessary thing she was, we didn’t know

wildness disapproves halter, lead, longe-line,

the coaxing regardless how gentle. 

That first time, nylon rope melting calluses,

she pulled and `reared to strike front hooves down. 

 

I dodged the tumult, tried again, and,

next, was awarded the hip-pivot

to kick.  Round and round, the mare

and I danced, one step from disaster,

one slip from what was paramount

 

for those closest to me, wishing death

upon themselves, desiring dust

beneath the horse’s hooves.  She

had stood her ground before against others.

Knowing the enmity of unwant,

 

she worked death out of me.

Her stampings my heart’s knocking,

her bolting as from invisible fear

my stubborn holding on.  I stayed

with her, stayed with her,

 

stayed with her until she calmed

at my singing, until she plodded behind me,

head down, hooves hoving quietly.

Until, among similar enemies,

wild things made their peace.

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​

PLAIN SENSE

 

               Required, as a necessity requires.

                --Wallace Stevens, “The Plain Sense of Things”

 

Plain speech for a plain people:

weather-words gray as old lumber;

old sheds and old houses

sitting on the tilted legs of wind;

​

verbs the cranes dancing, the snow geese dangling,

something wild dashed

into wilder brush or wood, the slow steady plow

of an idea through black dirt, the blossom.

​

We drive the long, sleepy phrases, and

turn sharp on a country thought;

the gravel punctuates, the noun-heart steers.

A sentence like a pivot: the steel spans circle;

 

the cold spray a nourishment, a continued green.

 

*

 

Two ways of looking at things:

 

Rain falling onto your face from a black sky.

Or, the head turned toward the ground,

the face blurred in the puddle where rain drops.

 

In the snow funnel, walking blindly through the white of it,

frost in the beard, sweet moist on cold lips.

Or, still: an iced pond, a silver slip of creek.

 

The mouse in the alfalfa, the hawk’s black eye.

Or: the turn, the absolute fall.

The beak, the flesh, the stone talons.

​

The ground, too, like stone.

Or, the mud temptation.

Or, the porous dark, the quilted bed, the dormant seed.

 

*

​

A man wears a sandstone face.

Call it character.

Call it erosion.

The deep cut, the gradual smoothing, the permanence.

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*

​

Every which way the wind:

the cattle-clouds, the skiff-snakes, the gnat-dust;

the dead dressed in green robes swaying, breathing, amorous.

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*

​

Old men passed us bottles of home-brew and we drank.

The taste bitter, the spillage dripping from the spigots of our faces.

The bitterness we recall as sweet: it was cold and wet on a parched day.

​

Old women poured us coffee from granite-wear pots.

Bavarian china chipped or cracked: chapped lips against our lips.

The hot potion we sweetened, clouded with cream or sipped straight  and black.

The house was a mood: damask, vinegar, alum, dust.

 

*

 

The swallow is a question mark, the fence posts exclamations.

The elliptical miles, the emphatic cottonwoods.

 

*

 

Today, the tasseled breasts of corn, the bearded milo.

The wheat ambles and jigs; the alfalfa swims nude in a blue-green pond.

How can you doubt the optimism of hail, tornado, drought?

 

*

 

A child toes the dust and sees creation.

Someone dead smiles in the cloud.

A child picks up a stone and skims the water top.

More pleasure in plunking it to the depths.

 

A child dismembers a grasshopper.

Later, he puts it back together to dismember it again.

 

*

 

The metaphor went around the property.

Meshed, electric, paneled, barbed.

 

It sectioned the place like a quilt.

It linked.

 

The cattle did not wander, the calves bawled and sucked.

Pigs squealed and the feeders banged.

The horses ran or lulled about, nodding.

 

It made the garden secure.

 

The city folk who came out to sell us something

had to stop at the gate where a big dog stood, growling,

baring its teeth.

 

*

 

A young woman once sat in a pickup truck

high atop a country hill, the hot then cold wind

blowing through open windows, her hair streaming her face,

the black clouds on the night sky

defining blackness.

 

The music was what she loved: the wind-moan,

the sky-sigh heavy, the cloud heart-knock.

The truck waltzed on its tires.

 

And best, most best: the sharp light like nerve-something, yes,

and, yes, yes, the thunder.

 

*

 

A plain word is a simple tool.

A nut tightened on its bolt,

the pieces holding.

 

*

 

The bull snake crawling on the blacktop

is exact.

 

The vapor, a heat-thing that crawls and disappears,

is exact.

 

The meadowlark, perched on a fencepost,

singing, is exact.

 

And when it flies away, and yet you hear the song,

and feel the heat coil or fly about you,

this is exact, too.

 

*

 

It has to have a certain flatness,

like old folks talking on a porch swing

under the bright bulbs of stars,

the electric buzz of cicadas, a chain creaking.

Soft words like the long smoke of a good cigar.

 

It has to be an observable silence, each spoken stone

compelling,

a flint,

or the snarl of a black cloud-wall just before the point is made.

 

*

 

Our eyes hold the almighty sky in callused hands.

Our ears sip deep the odorous blue.

 

*

 

The swirl of leaves

is the rattle of brown bones down casket roads.

The swirl of geese and crane,

their bell-gongs,

is trinity:  birth, covenant, everlasting.

 

*

 

An old farmer danced a polka with a pump handle.

All the old and young cows cried as the music poured.

 

He switched partners, holding hands with a hay hook,

swinging bales, the dust kicking its heels.

 

All day like this:  everything a tune, everything a dance.

Even as he slept, there was a rhythm to it.

 

*

 

There must be a recognition of need,

and need is the plain sense of things near.

 

*

 

Out here, water is the great wheel turning.

Listen to the gurgling gears of pond, creek, river.

 

Out here, we stand at the center of the great wheel,

and we are the ponds, the creeks, the rivers.

 

So long as there is water, the necessary machine runs.

 

*

 

Were the weather any different,

it would not be ours.

 

Neither the land, how it lifts and falls,

the way a finch dips

or the steep to which the hawk glides

or the depths to which it plunges.

The burdens, the joys, the loves, the broken things:

they would not be ours if they were different.

 

Anything else and we should destroy the essential:

the gopher-intelligence, the ground muscle,

the harvest-soul.

 

What is here is ours.

What is here suffices.

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​

 

A THOUSAND REASONS

 

After rain, day’s end, steam rises

from the pasture, coastal hay summer brittle.

Fog sits on the cool green of loblolly pine

and white oak.  Egrets at a pond’s edge

at the edge of sight lift and float away.

Twilight darkens.

                            The old horse, retired,

sullen and wet, stands the ground

that one day will stand him.

What is there not to love? 

Frogs and toads switch on, and—

there they are as if the first stars—

the fireflies revolving around him,

the universe’s center still unspooling.

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​

 

ON HORSEBACK, HELL’S GATE CANYON, OCTOBER

 

We ride past basalt columns, ascend

a cow face to top an outcropping

above the Snake and sit there, and watch.

 

Here is the topography of desire:  a sky heavy

with grey smoke, the blue and ancient river,

unrequited; the rogue, stiff bunch

 

of thistle and sage, brown, curled coneflowers,

and across the stream the accumulated green.

All those oppositions that pull toward a center.

 

Like the pleated hills of the canyon, distance

pushes away, pushes past an irreparable edge.

Yet here we are, two long-time lovers on horseback,

 

relics to a belief, putting the pieces together

that creation could not.  Constancy a thing

like a slow horse plodding along the veins

 

that bighorn and cattle cut through rock.

Trust like giving the horse his head

to feel his way over stony rubble,

 

perilous going, getting there.

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​

 

In Hurricane, with Horses

 

The man, gray-flannel shirt lifted overhead

shielding him, strides long, alone in the blow—north

then south, cold then hot.  Who would think

to count the rain, weightless, infinite, like slivers.

 

He yells and whistles silence against the howl

at six horses hunkered under oaks at pasture’s end.

All around, the woods groan, their bones pop.

The sky churns blackening butter.

 

Insensate, he wades waist-deep grass rolled flat

as by waves upon a long, black shore.

A loblolly pine collapses, its root ball like a molar;

a wire tangle blossoms barb and spark.

 

The horses circle upon the circle of themselves.

He stands at their nervous center, an eye.  Easy now,

he coos, and slips the halter upon the oldest head,

the one to lead the rest to shelter.

 

Now unhurried plodding, budge and push:

the cadence of the high terrain, the rocky switchback.

Above them, clouds like cliffs ascending,

pitch and plunge looming.

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​

REMEMBERING NIXON

 

            “Maybe you're only thinking 'bout yourself.”

                        —Randy Newman, “Mr. President”

 

It may sound funny, but sometimes

I feel older than I should.  Cold wind blows

and puts my mind into reverse

like an old Chevy pickup; the clutch burns.

 

Nixon, I do not wish to think about liars

or Watergate, Agnew or clumsy Ford

tripping off the plane.  Instead, conspire

to remember peace signs held above heads

 

like someone arrested as acclamation

of birds, herons or egrets striking for the pond

across Farm Road, or the buzzard occupation

of treetop scrag while I dig.  (No,

 

damn you ugly things, I am not dead!).

Keep news stuck in a box atop a cabinet,

old trash yet to be taken to the dump.  It

may sound funny, now, that friends and cousins

 

went to jungles south of nowhere

and returned in bits and bitter,

shaken and cloudy as mother of vinegar.

Their talk of napalm and villages on fire,

 

of helicopters, VC breaches and inaccurate

coordinates, now blossom like birds

that leapt from chests.  Nixon, let’s chat:

a crook should be a bend in a brook

 

shaded over in willow, cattails and reeds

whistling of themselves or of redwings and larks,

the mud smirking; dragonflies and bees,

black wasps and swallowtails.  Dick,

 

you never left, but waved your arms

and reappeared in magic multitude in masks.

It’s funny, now, that I’m digging up my yard,

a working man, to fix a broken line

 

where sewage spills stink into my grass.

Up to my elbows in the worry of it,

repairing.  A work for which, I guess,

I am capable, this song in my head

 

like indefensible you, Mr. President:

Too late to run, too late to cry

now, (are these gnats mere coincidence?)

the time has come for us to say goodbye.

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THE  CANNAS                           

 

Blooms like battle plumes over her head,

the pug pokes out her flat face from between big leaves,

waits to ambush her sister stomping heavily by. 

The hidden one crouches, black inside the shadows

of sun-reaching flowers.

                                    A poet friend once warned:

you can’t write poems about dogs—it’s the death of poetry,

ask Browning or Arnold.  But it’s not about dogs so much

as cannas, red and orange, green-leafed and chocolate,

towers of a castle on fire,

                                     and less about cannas

than pathways coursed, as a boy, inside my father’s corner patch,

my own sister, her heart diseased, months from death,

plodding toward the swing where she flew until she’d vomit.

My assault awaited her, summer cooler under the cannas’ dark umbrella.

Leaping out at her, we’d scream delight, race a circle around the house

that left her breathless. 

                                    She’d sit and I’d run for the both of us.  

As perhaps I still do, these years later.  Like a dog’s tenacity,

locking jaws onto a rope or sock and pulling for all its worth. 

The cannas swing on small winds, blooms like tongues

as much as flames, leaves hands and arms waving goodbye or hello,

anyway you look at it, perennial.

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