David Beebe

Is It Nothing to You, All Who Pass By?


At the campfire I run my fingers through my hair
as a woman might, one of us the sacrificial lamb.
The wind has gone as embers glow like the vermilion
floors of Limbo, a reminder that home is not a place
and you certainly cannot go there again.

Across the lake there is a coyote effort to stir the soul,
much like the street evangelist this morning outside
the gas station with his band of grim disciples, clean cut
in their Sunday suits, looking on as their child king treats
open air to Lamentations and Revelation as if it were
Macbeth and Waiting for Godot.

David Beebe

Fort Gibson


Leaving the marina, the blue heron stands
at the rock island tip and stretches toward blue
sky, focused on the water’s surface and what might
exist beneath, like a patron saint of silverfish or
shipwrecks. Its wings unfold and shade the water and
as we pass I wonder whether to pray to the bird or
bribe with bluegill. I lay back under the blazing sun and
cross my arms, hand feed cigarette butts to dented beer cans,
wave at passing boats like I’m running for office.
Anchored near shore we unload the boat
for lunch in the shade of a thinning dogwood,
intoxicated off one another, or sunstroke.
Deer tracks map between trees and naked roots
before they disappear further inland.
She laughs at something I said and for a moment I imagine
the gentle algorithm it would take to hold her hand.
Barefoot on the rocks, it’s hard not to
believe all this was made for you and me.
Later in the middle of the lake the boys bob like buoys
as the girls pull at their swimsuits, connect thread to tanline
with white and pink borders like European boundaries;
parts of the world I’ll never see. I watch the shoreline
for another heron, the patron saint
of wardrobe malfunctions.

Originally appeared in The 3288 Review: Winter 2017.

David Beebe

Third of July


Before red and purple arrangements
illuminate our faces in the cerulean sky,
before a fountain of sparks shower the sidewalk,
before the smell of black powder, before
thunderstorms cool the night in ways
reserved for golden months, she asks me
how I’m doing when I arrive, and after
thinking it over a moment, I tell her much
better now. She asks if I had a rough day
and I think no, not really, I mean better now
that I’m here, breathing your air, and that
you’re you and nobody else is.

David Beebe

Golden hours


I hear your voice in a whisper in the windswept
rake of fallen leaves and creak of late winter
tree limbs, words never spoken by you or anyone
else, passing over the dead and reborn alongside
the seraphic commentary of birds. I feel your
warmth in golden hour as the sun sinks into
hillsides and I say a prayer reserved for you
and only you, something only you’d understand
for this language knows no tongue, and as the
moon rolls along the sky in its black silky film
I taste the air of half a life ago – your hair
flowing down my shoulder, body soft and
connected to mine, talking to dead stars
as one night peers into the other.

David Beebe

Dallas to tulsa, January


Texas barks like a dog at the end of its chain
in the rear-view mirror, a winter storm bulged and
flashing, growling low as we cross the Red River.
In Oklahoma there’s a dirt road named Choctaw Kennedy.

Separate land from country, peel it back
like snakeskin and cicada shells as naked trees
sink in shadows, gold crawls along hillsides like
window shades, our automobile outline paused
in motion, overlapping pebbled shoulders, bleached
prairie grass, road construction, plastic flower
arrangements and wooden crosses serving as
roadside graves, someone’s daughter now belongs
to the turnpike. In a field the color of pencil shavings,
an old man fixes his message of damnation and love, and
vultures conduct concerts of buffalo, shredded paper
tumbling.

Ahead in a runoff ditch, a drainage pipe, and
I anticipate its passing, for in a brief moment,
I’ll see through to the other side.

Originally published in New Plains Review: Fall 2016.

David Beebe

Mozart of the Prairie


I heard the tiratana on waves of tallgrass prairie
as it passed over hidebound barbed wire, careful not
to be caught on the rusted tines like an article of clothing.
Carolina chickadees flew over the fence, over me, over
the five precepts, over the pagoda. I thought of the old poet
who counted every bird he ever saw – passing at his desk,
pen in hand – the number, known only to him, rivaled
a crisp night of stars.

Originally published in Sugar House Review: Fall/Winter 2018.

David Beebe

Fireflies


Behind the backyard in red gold afternoon,
shadows from the freeway wash against the tide of
forty-year-old homes in the neighborhood,
like wings from great barn owls stretched over shingles
and satellite dishes. Planes float down to earth
in graceful stride; the sound of wresting dead leaves
from naked trees, leaving jet engine echoes to mix
with rush hour traffic like seltzer water.

Natural light pulls me as I pass
from room to room.
Two windows in the room I rent open
to the street and the khaki-colored grass.
The white noise of our upper stories, our
memoir of visions; nouns and verbs led us here.
Mom, Dad, the VCR. As I’m alone in the room,
time continues without my consent, loved
ones endure without my company, lives
flicker outside my own in concatenation with fireflies;
my parents slowly separating in another state,
the girl across town who sleeps through the night
and talks to God and thinks absolutely nothing of me.

An indentation at the end of the bed hints of a ghost,
warns of high blood pressure, or driving under
the influence, or that a life not shared was
never a life at all.

Originally published in This Land: Fall 2015.