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

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.

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.