The Poetry of David Chorlton

Now you see it, the magician says, unveiling the wall

of cereal packages in the supermarket,

now you don’t, turning on the news.

Freedom is his specialty:

a rabbit in a top hat

pulled out for show

and made to disappear

when it squirms too much.

He opens a fan in his hand;

He saws you in half

to give you two choices

at once

and waits for applause

before putting you back together.

Then he tells you to stand

perfectly still

and calls

for the knife thrower.

Don’t be nervous,

he says as he ties the blindfold,

A coal train winds

its way between seasons.

Summer fades

into the cottonwoods

beneath a ruin on the cliffs

six hundred autumns empty,

past an eagle’s nest

with fledglings gone,

and one river deep

into the ground.

Water rumbles on its bed

and at each steep curve

the silent rocks absorb

a drawn out screech

of steel.

One mile west of the museum

displaying ancient artifacts

is the bus stop shelter
where the descendants of those who crafted them

spend the summer days

sipping beer. Here are pigeons in the palm trees,

kestrels on the wire,

and in winter the hawk outside its range

perches in the tallest eucalyptus. A short walk away

is the emergency room

with a television burning images

of fast cars into the brains

of patients all year. Across the street

a shopping cart has not been moved since the monsoon

when someone gave up pushing it

and left the paperback

half read, the pack of cigarettes half smoked,

and a plastic sheet

folded beside the stars

and faded stripes. To the south

is the library

where the homeless in all seasons

rest from hauling garbage bags.

A week from Halloween

flags hang in the residential streets

beside the faces of ghosts

with the compost smell rising

from the seeds of winter lawns. We stay green

from Thanksgiving to spring, bury the months as they pass

beneath freeways so as always to live

for the future with the immigrants on Central

standing in line, still entering the country

with no border in view, counting the days

until the next holiday sale.

Early morning our sky is powder,

then it hardens into a shell

holding down the heat,

and finally it burns

away as another cowboy sunset

reflecting in the tall glass buildings

where air bites through the skin.

The oldest inhabitants of Phoenix

remember when a fan

blew through wet linens

to keep them cool. The small town

of their childhood years

lies under this one, built one house

at a time with opium

in the Chinese den and stars

they could count. They have survived

along with the lizards

who found refuge in their gardens

and the spiders

marked with an hourglass.

They have fed a thousand hummingbirds

and watched their city grow

on televisions they can’t turn off,

still waiting to see the sky

as the last part of the desert

to disappear.

 Copyright by David Chorlton

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