RAY WHITAKER

 

 

Mountain Sky

 

These aren’t white fluffy ones

they’re the grey ones

the kind when you can smell the rain before

a trick of the olfactory

 

that change in humidity

in somehow your nose picks up

putting one in touch with just how poor

the sense of smell is in we humans

 

that wet is over the next ridge

the elk and mountain lions are getting drenched

they can have it

our evening wind is blowing it east, away

 

its cloudy       

big grey arms reaching into a lightening flight

with the white spaceship clouds

dark grey becomes lighter, white darker.

 

I can see the struggle

and smell the wet still.

 

Over the ridgetop comes a raptor

looks to be a golden eagle

soaring into the dry away from all that wet

canting right, then left - a joy flying into sunlight.

 

Suddenly, a memory of little kids arms all extended

pretending to be wild birds

that release of pure childhood fantasy

then jumping in the big pile of  leaves

 

sitting up, a couple of dry brown leaves

falling off the child’s ears

a sudden realization that, frowning

she’s not flying anymore.

 

Workin’on It

 

Reflecting on the two strange phone calls

that had happened today

his wife had called, and it seemed

to fuss about the usual:  money

 

he had to be away,

like the geese have to fly north

that unerring sense of mapless direction

it just had to be.

 

Saturn was in the night sky

or was it Jupiter

he was never really sure

they both have moons, right?

 

She seemed content enough back there

reaffirmed it when asked, and the separation

just brought it closer to his concerns

she had terminal cancer.

 

There was Mercury in the morning darkness

Bright.  It was not as the moon was

he thought of her, and the waning

of her life, the cancer of her liver.

 

Yet she still complained, even on the phone

again, Another childish obsession

with something she thought she heard

in his spoken word from an earlier call.

 

She dwelled in it,

like a frog in the water

sometimes on the shoreline of a pond

as underwater, now immersed in the struggle

 

wondering about the color of righteousness

thinking that if people could be made, enabled

somehow to show their color

contrasted with the color of greed,

 

a new way or reading body language

that didn’t require aura-reads

would it make a integrity difference

or just make prejudice more visible.

 

On Clear Creek

 

The pair of Stellar Jays are really, really blue

more than I’ve ever noticed before, anywhere

so blue like the sopranos singing such pure tones

no words, a soaring litany to color

the shining blue feathers sheen under wings afloat.

 

The Jays ride the wind in to blue sky above

only coming to rest

in that tall, green ponderosa pine just over there

all three are reaching skyward

there all know the currents of freedom.

 

 

RAY WHITAKER