David Beebe

Greenhorn


Little sparrows tap on the glass of the door
before little bounces send each into damp grass
that feather their tummies as a robin tugs at earthworms,
their wriggling bodies evicted from the soil. These
tufted hieroglyphics chirp and hop and stop to
watch the door for movement. They must know
about the time I searched how to build a birdhouse
on the internet or about the feeders I eyed at the
farming goods store. They must also know
I’m sincere when I whistle along to their individual
songs that carry high in the elm and cypress, just
as I know I’m not judged by my coworkers for fumbling
their native tongue – a fire kept in the blackened
pane of a brakeman’s lantern, or between two red
and orange palms, or held waist-high in the oxbow bend,
waiting to bite into tart tangelos under a full moon,
shadows stretched and dancing over land with no boundaries.

David Beebe

Westerlies


Everything is greener this morning,
the sun hounding the edge of the earth,
rolling and coughing in apocalyptic dogma
as I stand in the shadows waiting for the light
to purify.

The night was long and heavy, like an animal
kicking out the inventory of my chest, but this
morning promises new birds and their new songs.

I’m sorry for the fourteen thousand variations
of self and the ghost given unto you. I wish to beg
forgiveness, though it may never come, and even
if it does, it will be so sudden and quiet, like
soft-spoken westerlies, I’ll never know it arrived,
never know it’s gone, like prayers and their
destinations.

Stay thankful for gods of rebirth and
the interstate’s shoulders sprinkled with
Indian paintbrush and laurels of blue wild indigo.

David Beebe

So Long, See You Tomorrow


Note: This was written August 8th, 2019. On the fifth anniversary of Berman’s death, I remembered this little thought existed.

David Berman died yesterday.

This made the three dollar drinks at the hotel bar
a little bittersweet, and though the Two-Hearted Ale
was near perfect, and Detroit walked off in the ninth,
I kept coming back to David all alone in Chicago, or
alone enough to pull the plug, and how over the years
I too have felt like checking out from time to time –
ultimately glad I never did. It is tragic how short
life is, how demanding and time consuming, keeping
us from what makes us happy.

I don’t know.

I hope David found happiness. I listened to his final
music early this morning in the backseat on the drive
to the Upper Peninsula. It was there the whole time.

Our boat trip to Pictured Rocks was canceled
thanks to high winds and choppy waters, instead
hiking to Miners Castle in the crisp afternoon, and
at one point I looked over the railing at the scenic
overlook and pictured myself jumping, only
I never hit the ground.

David Beebe

Dear Sister


Sometimes I drive past the blue house
with its ashen roof and white trim, note
the collected changes of a decade –
gone the bushes at the end of the cracked
driveway, gone the redbud popcorn bloom of spring.
There’s a small garden in the backyard
where the above ground pool used to bring
the family together, and the wide oak, sick
with canker and BB pellets, no longer leans
heavy into the porch, lending shade to those
unforgiving summer evenings.

I see you, bouncing room to room as if we
were too poor for doors, your hair electrocuted,
the bottom of my outstretched t-shirt scraping
the carpet. I see the home movies where you
played all the parts. I see our first dog, scarred
by coyotes – still her tail thumps the floor.

The old neighborhood is a horseshoe in
the wandering lens of a cold satellite,
a postcard with a watermark so fine
you don’t have to hold it to the light.

The door is locked, but all our ghosts still haunt inside.

David Beebe

El Jardinero


He kneels closer to his work, ninety-two in the shade,
cigarette dangling from his mouth as smoke mixes into
his stringy, black hair with a little gray like the weathered
back of a cattle dog. Ash drops onto the ovate hosta leaf
and he brushes it away with his thumb. The air, thick as
bathwater, chases the last of the bruised rainclouds that
had briefly paused his work, beads of moisture ornamental
on the lenses of his glasses. He reaches his hands into
wet earth and pulls toward his body like a lucky hand of poker.
He digs and digs and I know his mind is elsewhere.
He stops and looks at the hole, there on his knees.
He returns the dirt inside and lays the base of a new gardenia
bush and I wonder where he had gone the moment before.

David Beebe

Painting of a morning


I used to lay in the dark with this wild idea
that great celestial beings stood guard at the
corners of my room, shrouded in ten-thousand
unblinking eyes and milk-white fire, deputized
by Christ to keep Satan and his supporters from
scratching at the window and pulling my card.
I would ask God to look after me and those I loved
and those I didn’t understand, and if I couldn’t sleep,
be it youthful regret or the shadowed chimera at
the foot of the bed, I would open a gospel and
thumb for red letters. Now I close my eyes and
breathe deeply, picture myself in Northern California
fishing the Sierra Nevadas with Dad and all the dogs
we ever had. I picture sitting at the dinner table with
Mom and my sister, laughing as the record skips,
our feet in the cool sand watching boiler steam
from the Ludington ferry stretch clear to Wisconsin
as if tethered to the purview. I search both sand dune
and marram grass for new angles to old ideas,
the answer high in rafters, with the sweet, painful
reminder that all roads end – mine a thinning two-track
weaving in and out, past valleys and over hillsides before
tapering off into row after row of eastern white pine.
And with it comes the night, and the dark we all
succumb to. Then I dream.

David Beebe

Caught Looking


Beneath Broken Arrow power lines,
Drummond Island in damp knee high grass,
Croton and Henning Park, warmed in last
light; the ball turns purplish orange with
short tosses upward before landing in soft
leather, like the fitted glide of putting on
Sunday shoes. I love the motion, the rhythm,
the movement of the seams – spinning, floating,
dancing, guided by higher, misunderstood things.
Deer watch from the edge of left field as coyotes
canter in right, in royal view of the town water
tower across the river, last in feeling the sun,
framed in center. Practicing our knuckles and
curves like boys who never wandered into the
woods, never stared down wolves in new darkness.

Originally appeared in The Tulsa Voice: October 2017.

Link to poem

David Beebe

Daylight savings time


I fell from the treehouse
as the adults talked in the kitchen.
I stared up at the tree that betrayed me,
past the leaves and branches at the moon
in early evening, nestled close like a piece
of fruit, wondering if the tree would let
the moon tumble too.

Sitting here now I smell sweet redbud
on the tail end of a western prairie fire,
rows of Bradford pear looking like winter
now more than three months ago. A county
burn ban keeps us from collecting kindling
and raking sanguine coals, over and over again.

A mourning dove rests at the edge
of the roof as I start to shiver in the shade –
the shadow swallowing the new grass of the
courtyard. Her song asks for warmer days
and spring showers and I tell her the rain
will keep coming till the rain gets it right.

David Beebe

Hawk Moon


for Sam Shepard

I heard his braided stories of
cowboys and astronauts on the radio
through the charcoal filter he was known for,
a handwritten receipt of the wry Southwest.
In San Luis he leans against a door frame –
thin with sheep’s wool hugging the neck
of his denim jacket, cattleman cowboy hat
tilted, brim over his eyes, taking in the room.

The mountains from where I drink
their shadows slide into the sea, and
still their rivers breed continuity, hands
cupped in the cool, trickling flow like
the moon naked behind clouds.

Last night a coyote pup darted
in front of my truck on the way home.
I should’ve known it was you.

Originally published in The 3288 Review: Autumn 2019.

David Beebe

Cherokee Skies


This weather confuses the birds, I’m told.
Seventy-three degrees in January on a Thursday afternoon.
The trees talk of former windfalls, widow makers,
cradled for baptisms under Cherokee skies – bark stripped
white like antlers tangled in black hickory, dried
leaves the rustle of balled paper.

Winter is barely out the gate
but spring chews in our ear.

The trees talk and I listen.