David Beebe

Three Poems


When Grandpa Died

She sat quietly with her lunch, overlooking
the Chippewa River through the dining room
bay windows as sunlight pierced through the clouds
for the first time that day.

From the screened porch I spoke to my aunt and uncle
and cousin as grandma watched the bend in the river knee,
its banks plump with snow.

I still don’t know if she recognized me standing there,
or simply waited for the right moment to speak, but
after some time she looked up and smiled and said
“It’s good to see you, dear” before returning to the river.


Kodama

I wander the dark house after everyone has gone to bed,
looking for any sign of my grandfather’s ghost. Under
the streetlamp the streets shine from fresh rain like sweat
on a damp forehead. As a child the signs of life were
the police scanner in the living room, sometimes
accompanied by his silhouette in his recliner, listening
in the dark, and later, as an adult, his constant coughs
and groans, signs of life from the room below, my grandmother
beside him, awake, holding his hand.

But he did not die here. He left in the middle of the night,
unable to breathe on his own, seven miles south in a nursing
home where he spent the final months of his long life. Maybe
his ghost is still out there, wandering, turned around in a cornfield
or pulled by the scent of his past life to the creek he crossed
as a teenager, the fields of high grass covered in dew, his pant legs
soaked to the knees on his nightly walk in the dark to see June,
his love, years before they married.

The signs are everywhere, they just are not here.

The white figure out the living room window
is not my grandfather and I don’t ask his name.
He belongs to someone else, and I wave him on.
He heads through the trees to the river where a spirit
can travel twice as fast. The ballfield near the river
where I chased grounders and pop flies has gone through
so many changes, I struggle to recognize my own memories

The light that warms my face is death.

Maybe grandfather’s ghost is ashamed now the family knows
of his numerous infidelities, like the woman at the bar he saw often,
a ten minute walk from home. Where do you go if you can’t go home?
The river lets out at the Great Lake and there it is separated
from the sky by a line only the dead are willing to touch.


Mt. Pleasant

We identified the callery pear tree and paradise apple,
both white as cherry blossom. Grandma said this was
the first time she had sat in the garden, though she had
the best view from her bedroom window. She gave her
blessing to my sister and her boyfriend and their plans
to move to Hawaii and I admit disappointment in myself
for not being able to offer her the same.

As we left she gave me a hug and said “If I’m not here
next time you visit, you know where I’ll be,” just as she
had the last five years, but this time I think she means it.
The sun broke through the clouds on the ride home yet
the light continues to dim.

David Beebe

November



I like the cold, overcast days of autumn.
Mist freckling the windshield as leaves
shiver and take Golden Gate leaps into
their savior’s arms, being led across
golden shores and into windswept streets
and damp alleys, garbage bags, and
overzealous burn piles next to mailboxes.

Closets cough up college sweatshirts and
blue jeans for girls by the fire, hair as graceful
as American flags fanned by the cold, dead
breath of Rome, naked and auburn in last sunlight.

The birds that stay turn dusk to dawn
with their songs, their meanings so vast
even in death we’ll never fully understand.

David Beebe

Eventually


We will grow tired of raising the flag
to half-mast every morning at the post
office, the elementary and high school,
the courthouse, the fire station. Even at
our churches, outnumbering the gas stations in town.

Your neighbors will lose track of national
tragedies as the news reports the dead like
football scores on the bottom crawl of the
television screen.

Pastors, guns at their hip, wonder why the
congregation wears black on Sunday and
politicians ask Jesus where the youth vote went.
Teachers, once worried of overcrowded classes,
now count the empty desks, school halls
still as mausoleums.

Days we were told never to forget,
now too many to remember.

David Beebe

After Hours


Smoke tangles with tangerine clouds on the horizon
like an invitation sealed in a soft cream envelope.
The dying breath of day sends an empty beer can down
the street into fresh dark, where no doubt it’ll go on forever.
One by one neighbors shut their windows but still
the laugh tracks bounce off brick and concrete, knowing
good and well this life is syndicated.

Next door two boys punch it out in the mosquito glow
of the streetlamp – shirts ripped, cursing like their fathers,
the neighborhood in silence as this happens all too often.
The world just isn’t big enough for boys with two first names.
You would’ve pulled them apart.

Last night I saw you in Cape Canaveral as rockets became
raptured in ribbons of smoke and you tossed your hair over
your shoulder and waved at the camera, laughing with all
your body the way honest people do. Before the end you said
without Him you were nothing, but even in nothing you were everything.

Often I awake in the dark unsure of where I am,
too afraid to move for there are killers on the highway,
haunted by white noise from an after-hours television.
Maybe it’s applause.

Originally appeared in Art Focus Oklahoma: Spring 2018.

Link to digital issue

David Beebe

Medicine woman later


It is hard not to picture their bodies,
stark in the contrast of new snow, lying
in the frigid shallow waters, their backs
to the sky in a final act of defiance –
her husband Black Kettle’s final words
heard only by yellow goldfinches,
preserved like Cheyenne arrowheads
hidden deep in pages of red earth, the
river playing with her long black hair like
bay grass in zephyr, her nine scars a
handwoven map leading back to Sand Creek.

David Beebe

In Light Of


The path bends through goldenrod and field thistle,
prairie sumac and Virginia creeper as I am gently
kissed by honeybees in the late September sun.
I ignore power lines, interstate tumult, groans of a
distant train, and in the shade of whispering bur oak
and hickory, the jagged teeth of stolen history prods
at the soles of my feet.

David Beebe

The Missionary House

It’s no coincidence the hand soap near
the kitchen sink is scented milk and golden honey,
and porcelain cherubs sing from hymnals
above the toilet, and the shower refuses to
get too hot in the morning, and every
painting of fruits and flowers, cottages
and streams are accompanied by scripture.

In one room there are two gold frames,
side by side, twin paintings of hummingbirds
dancing among purple hollyhocks, and if
it weren’t for the one on the right slightly
crooked, I couldn’t tell you the difference.

In the bathroom there’s another, titled:
“Burgundy Irises with Foxgloves.”
The caption reads whatsoever things are pure.

I note the mini-blinds blocking sunlight
with washboard efficiency. I run my fingers
along crow’s feet in the drywall, along door frames.
I tap the window for the attention of a one-legged
cardinal who takes three steps before flight.

I read as daylight drains from the room,
the words softening on the page.

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.