David Beebe

Lake Haskell


I cast into low-hanging sun, the line sparkling
gold and lying slack across the surface in the first
of three inlets, the rock edge rising steep from the
water like snowbanks. A pug-faced boy sells perch
and crappie from a white construction bucket slung
over his shoulder with a yellow piece of rope. He says
the secret is raw bacon and sits on the edge of the rock
face to watch his callused feet dangle over the side.
He talks with his back to me.

Clouds gather in the west for a moment and
a southern wind adds a chill, making little sense
for June in Muskogee County. I peek over my shoulder
to see if the boy is looking, but he still addresses himself,
so I reel in my three-hook rubber worm named
Bass Stopper for reasons I’ll never comprehend.

The second inlet has offered more success in the past.
Bluegill and small bass have easily been fooled on more
than one occasion, though not often enough to brag.
The middle inlet is more lively than the first – snakes
swim into my shadow and bolt deep into the lake and
blue herons jab at frogs and minnows where the lily
pads begin. I’ve watched largemouth, ignoring all
shiny and feathered ornaments tied by clinch knot,
sunbathe in the shallow of this fingered inlet – rolling,
white bellies shining, a single fin surfacing as if to wave
better luck next time.

A dusty two-track weaves around hickory and oak
patches and hugs the shoreline, connecting the three inlets
like a traced hand as white lotus lilies fold in the blue hue
of early evening. A straightness of least terns glide above
the third inlet like salt swept from a tabletop.

Lightning flashes in its cloudy belly
where the gray pages overlap and
I can see it on the water.

David Beebe

Creek


A small creek bends with the road, twin dancer
jukebox sway. Poplars on the bank lean in to listen,
others peer around the corner for the train.

There’s a search for smooth flat stones,
asking Jesus for an arrowhead, or better yet,
Sitting Bull on his painted horse, bending down
to hand me a stone teardrop before he whispers
to the horse Christ shall return when the buffalo do
as man and beast go scuttling into dust and sunlight.

Small rocks knock together in my pocket,
church bells as I run the water’s edge.
Dad whips his arm, commanding the creek
to ripple, and I simulate his movements,
heaving my small body, sandstone spinning
like flying saucers on late night tv.

My father’s rough hands, the white poplar
bark peeling – wallpaper to rooms undiscovered.

The stone I lost track of –
twenty years later, still skipping.

David Beebe

Harbinger


This morning I should be elsewhere.
I’d prefer a walk through the Kiamichi Mountains,
listening to melancholic mourning doves
above the whisper of ancient pine wind.
I should be waist deep in the Mountain Fork River,
sending the line back and forth with fluid
exaltation as a litter of freshly spotted fawns
observe with great interest downstream.

Instead I stand in the driveway as blackbirds
form a circle, startled from their leafless tree,
passing overhead with the sound of a soft wavelet.
I pray these small, wordless moments are able
to fix me.

A friend tells me his life is now filled with joy
and I struggle to understand the word as if
straining to hear the remaining rustle of a
dead language, the last sunlight dust of the romantics.

David Beebe

Deathbed


Her cancer returned by Thanksgiving,
worse than before, and her family began
the process of saying goodbye. A week
before she died she left the hospital
for the arms of her prairie home –
its wild blueberry bushes, endless sky,
her sacred dogs, and memory of horses.
She was made comfortable, no pain
I am told, in the house she raised
two boys with her husband of forty years,
her deathbed the old bedroom
of her firstborn, who pines for levity
wherever it may be found.
Why not his brother’s room? he asks,
with its two corner windows framing
golden fields and robin’s egg blue, but
like most things the answer is not known
nor explored, though I consider the room’s
closeness to the front door, for when
the time came for her to leave, only
the dogs would see her go.

David Beebe

Corinthians


Love is a lazy river.
Love is a tight pair of jeans.
Love is the passing of a cool canteen
in the shade of a breezy willow tree.
Love is one cigarette lighting another.

Love is in tell-tale signs, last call, or a thunderstorm in autumn.
Love is a crack inching its way across the windshield.
Love is North Dakota, seen through the bedroom window of a beautiful girl.

Love is a parent choosing their child over God.
Love is the epilogue.

David Beebe

Weather Report


Fifty-three at daybreak,
the river meandering to its big cousin,
Michigami.

Time passes slowly, I say
as the last four years feel like
a cold decade of doubt, anger,
and lonesomeness.

In honor of the mighty Masquigon,
I start the morning with a cold shower,
baptized once again in glacial render,
the spark needed to wake purer,
more genuine.

Oh, how I love to beat the sun
and its harlequin pageantry.

Pink and blue and orange clouds
rising like once dormant volcanoes.

I’m drunk on the idea
I’ll be someone new tomorrow.

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

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

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