Two Poems by David Chorlton

 

Bogart

The sky takes off its night mask.

Early walkers open wide their doors

and bring the pavements back to life

step by careful step

with a new day tugging

at its leash.  Going all to pieces says

the neighbor lady and Hell

is the end of the street.  She's eighty-six and spent

last night dancing to forget

the state the country's in.  She woke up

with inflation on her mind and began

worrying where she left off before

sleep about people pouring across

the border.  She never looks up

at the mountain with its rippling spine

that was here before this was

a country.  She insists that everything 

was better before special effects

took over movies, and she smiles a friendly smile

to say and there are so many

shootings now, everyone should have a gun

while she taps her head to indicate the problem's

only crazy people. And remember 

it wasn't only Bogart: everybody

smoked in movies then.

Street Hawk

The fates left him

a city to live in.  Oh, he perches

in the highest tree at sunrise

to survey the wide green fairways and sharpen

his gaze on the whetstone

awakening grass becomes

then fans the primaries with centuries

of open land trailing

from his tail, but the ground beneath him now

has a human face.  He's making a landscape

out of asphalt

and turns the placid sky

into a storm

when his wings are wide and he slices

through an urban flock

with history's wind

in his bones.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978.  His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and often reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior.  His newest collection of poems is Unmapped Worlds from FutureCycle, and The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.