One thought drops across the hillside.
Its facets shine along cold furrows,
breaking into consciousness,
slide down
deliberate as rain
into pipes a hollow silver
into troughs
their green arms open
into ruts full up with a brown laughter
into old weeds
a joyous handshaking
after young ducks
chuckling even as bridesmaids
their white wings floating
through each puddle
and every pool
the pale color pouring
across the threshold.
Val Morehouse,
This version: May 2000
Click title to read each haiku:
______© Val Morehouse, 5 Haiku
Bright-faced flowers and bushes circle these old foundations,
the way wagons rolling West once curved in defense of life and limb.
This is the country where seasons still bloom from memory to hope.
Settlers have put down 30-year stakes and nested here on the
well-kempt streets, caped inside green yards played by stair-step
next generations, romping with their furry side-kicks.
Weekdays childish hordes grab lunch boxes decorated with
super heroes, stuffed with PB&J’s, and run for a bus to that place
where they are all taught to count on the future.
Weekdays Moms and Dads back out of the driveway,
bearing lunch in a brown paper sack. Frugal and reasonable, they
support the PTA, make work happen, help neighbors, and pay on time.
For this crime of naïveté all stand in contempt, and are
accused of harboring the ‘American Dream’. Guilty of
trust and that silly old belief in the law, these little people have
Mortgaged it all to powers housed far from the family place,
in great skyscrapers of marble, steel and glass fed by
concrete streets and elevators that rise higher than ethics.
There nothing but a faceless number in a computer knows
their address, their name. The only thing green is plastic,
% interest is the only crop; and honesty died with the Pilgrims.
Even then some insider with options back-dated, off-shore shells, birthday parties
where the ice statues piss champagne, and bonuses for failure and greed,
is stealing their last identity for quick sale on the internet.
______© Val Morehouse, September 2008
“Old woman, where is it? Give it up!”
You crouch saying nothing.
“Nothing?” One soldier ravishes
a green crust jaded with mold,
your answer, from the
small box of your body.
Like opals your eyes alarm them.
Faces consume your last moments,
but soldiers cannot devour
your miserable crust,
or your tears not different from
diamonds, or wind
that curls snail-like in each ear.
You breathe once. Still they find
nothing. Jewels in your cupboard,
gems in plain sight sparkle.
“You are wasting your time,” you say.
Armpit, breast, wrist, crotch,
eyelid, pulse, and pelvis are
pregnant with your secrets.
One brainy pearl mothered inside
your shell, wheels of blood,
the liver a garnet hub,
intestines that gust in weighty
rhythm; thus your heart keeps
time with sighs. The soldiers
at last synchronize.
One hand knots podlike lungs
with silence. Outside snow
dissolves into a white buzz only
soldiers hear now. Their hearts
counting down time yours lost, white
drifts ticking from bone of what was
once your house.
© Version 2007 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.
Tornado watch.
Hot air riding up and over
stillness. The horizon
bends like a lens and darkens
to the color of your eyes.
My skin gives up
whirling leaves of scent
to imprint a funnel of sheets.
Your body
rises over me.
Wind bends with the sound of
ripe wheat, your breath weaving my hair.
Let your hands cover my body
the way rain sweeps a landscape.
At my feet the rippling starts
Bones undulating. Spines snap,
My thigh becomes a harp playing the weather.
My nipples lift like the cloud tops. Stop.
Now. Stop now. Or run
for cover.
In a hail of kisses I turn my face
twisting into the sound of your heart.
Thunder let me be
Rent asunder to receive each
melting secret,
The way earth weeps, every
crevice inundated and swept
away in this devastation of
touches until nothing is left
but the rainbow.
© Version 2006 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.
© Version 2006 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved
© Version 2006 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.
Roughnecks pound the ground like a drum.
Pumps snout in the mud. A dirge of cables hums,
and needling gauges like buzzard tracks witch
for earth-dark blood.
Seeking some faint sulphur heartbeat this
necromancer’s derrick full of men black as crows,
stabs at the graveyard of ancient tree and sweet fern
like steel rain on a coffin.
Over cold bones of dinosaurs
they work an incantation for
shale waxy with crude,
plunging bit after bit into the casings,
Grinding diamond and everything else into a sauce
of greed and desire until it erupts into light,
a slippery fishskin rainbow
sheen only death and oil give up.
© Version 2006 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.
In tar beach towns roughnecks cast up,
climbing through muck like blackened grease monkeys
between sumps gummy with acrid crude.
Whole families broke down on the nuts and bolts of production,
earning poverty for their trouble and even
sleeping on ground The Company owned.
In heat only a rattlesnake could love and
breeze rank with petroleum funk they stuck
tents and shanties on ditch backs
like burr scabs on a starving dog,
stalking that next whiskey dollar the way
a lover drinks in an embrace.
Oil owned my family.
Its flare offs and blowouts they plowed into
a history of mud and fists and cable
song roaring through crops of derricks,
fields they planted for The Man, rigs
drilled like lightening bolts into the dirt.
Ruts and crushed gravel roads fed acres of hulks
raised from dust devils like some hellish corn
grinding ground day and night for a promise
of moisture, the remembered curl of spring sweet fiddleheads,
for the sound of ancient ocean surf long fallen
into a slurry of shit black dreams.
Until in sulphuric fury the tide turned
gushing back in a rumble of carbon futures,
splits of gas, and diesel, and kerosene
oozing blood of machines,
banking the metallic stink of money into
the sweaty cents of escape.
© Version 2007 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.
writing and poetry
poetry