Change of Possession
1.
The trail led to rooftops
instead of sea,
a quail in a small pine by a tagged wall
gurgled plaintively
How Many Locals
Did You Fuck on Your Vacation?
2.
Lost, I punted
a pinecone over its parent pine
Sidereal Day
Sad me, completist of vales,
obsolescent
dial turner
until
hanks of Hank catch in barbed static
Foolgatherer
working the seeming discrete
into clusters
bee pollen → fireworks
sold in the same fairgrounds lot
a vendor hugging to adjust
his ridiculous
heap of peanuts
laughing like a lost love is still
slipping his embrace
All the years
of opening wider to sun and rain in one
wave-polished drift log
floated off as smoke
from last night’s bonfire
like this thought: was it
sparks or moths,
mere chance or chance-
as-god
constellationed
the coat-wool you wear I follow
to the sea-cliff through daybreak mist?
Don’t Waste Time Wishing the Machine
that slashes stalks would first
carefully unhook
cornflowers and morning glories
See if you can relax 10% more, 11% more
like a raptor counter waiting to tap an iPad
Oh, Endless Mountains Area!
(next six exits)
Park
at the overlook, then
overlook
Alarm Calls
I see through sequoias and madrones the new
lipstick-shaped skyscraper across the bay
that already sinks a foot each year, looming over
the cranes that inspired the 4-legged vehicular killing machines
in the old blockbuster. A sawed-in-half deadfall
pushed off the trail says GS + RT, a tag
inside the porta john says Shorty Pooped Here,
its plastic urinal tilted to pour a cascade on boots,
little mock waterfall in this land of everlasting
drought and fire. Poor little VCs
with your billions to lose, don’t worry,
this flyer advertises the services of Water Witches
who for a fee dowse with downed branches sites
for industrial pumps to try and suck up what isn’t there. Everything
is mock now, I must be
old because it doesn’t surprise or bother me
those cranes unload crates of batteries the future will go
dead without or with, with
Wall Street betting on it. Later,
on the terrace, I wonder
if hummingbirds only visit the hanging
feeder when no one’s here, and who looked at one closely enough
to inlay its shape on this guitar’s pickguard? Must have been a
dead one stuffed one specimen. Is it a grigio or gringo
haze tuning this afternoon so that the spider web
between the balcony railing and its strand of Christmas lights
in July billows overstaying seductively? I refuse
to burn the web’s unique concentric handiwork on my mind’s eye
after a friend told me the allegory of our times: he locked himself out
and, waiting for his landlord, concentrated his focus
on the song of the bird he was hearing, in order to recognize later
its noble invitation back to the present moment, but
found out it was common, invasive, constant
in the neighborhood, un-banishable to the background—
he wakes to it now through the wall, he
is ripped by it out of every reverie.
Brandon Krieg is the author most recently of Receiver (Herring Alley Pamphlets, 2021) and Magnifier (Center for Literary Publishing, 2019) winner of the 2019 Colorado Prize for Poetry chosen by Kazim Ali and a finalist for the 2022 ASLE Book Award in Environmental Creative Writing. He lives in Kutztown, PA, and teaches at Kutztown University.