Gayle Kaune
Gayle Kaune has published widely in literary magazines
including Centennial Review, Greenfield Review, Seattle Review, South Florida
Review, and Willow Springs. Her poems have won several Washington
Poets Association awards, as well as the Ben Hur Lampman Prize, and her poetry
has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbooks include N-Sid-Sen Star
and Concentric Circles, which won the Flume Press award. Her book
Still Life in the Physical World is available from Blue Begonia Press. After
25 years in the Eastern Washington desert, she recently moved to Port Townsend.
Three Poems by Gayle Kaune
Red Shrine under Madrona Tree
(on July 20th, a group of women
hang a scarlet wedding sari
in a tree, create a shrine to loss)
These red fields are not blood
but they could be.
And the red dime,
a coin minted in the country of grief
where pink saris
hang from trees
and the wind whispers
the names of colors:
fuchsia, red, pink,
all the flesh tones of our lives,
my red-lipsticked mother,
her pink nails,
how she wanted them painted
that last week in the hospital,
how the aides insisted:
all color removed.
As her memory is removed,
“a person I loved”
that part’s easy, the rest fades
but outside at this makeshift shrine
she comes alive
in the folds of the windblown sari
we hang from the tree,
in the red shoes
and pink delphinium,
and the red notebook
with the red-tongued Kali
on the cover, dancing
atop Shiva, a god who sings,
a god who keens.
In These Canyons
. . . to the Navajo . . . the passage of
time is not important.
—National Park Service brochure, Canyon de Chelly
“Nobody does these road trips
anymore,” I tell my husband of thirty-four years.
“They’re cruising the Marquises,
kayaking the coast of Baja.”
Still, the two of us are following the old routes:
U.S.
sixty-six,
Arizona
two-sixty-four,
one road even called “the loneliest in America.”
We’re driving the Southwest—
Durango,
Moab, Chinle.
We’re listening to music;
today, a requiem.
Yesterday, the Navajo guide told us a story.
“We are in the Fourth World,
the Glittering World,”
she said. And there was a glow—sunrise rinsing
the mesa in pink, and later, purple shadows
sliding down sandstone walls.
Always, Father Sky. His wide smile
looking down at our day’s routine:
breakfast of cold cereal; pack the car; get in
and drive, the turning wheels grinding
our worries to sand. Where to stay the night?
Whether to stop and buy the yei be che
weaving from the grandmother beside the road?
One day we wander for hours
along a canyon ridge, stumble
into a silence we had almost forgotten.
We are together, this man and I,
and we are traveling,
across a vast landscape,
growing smaller.
We are listening to music, stories,
and the canyons.
We are hiking—Mesa Verde,
Arches, Canyon de Chelly,
searching for something.
It’s about heat,
sandstone, and petroglyphs;
red rock, pinnacles, and pictographs—
of horses, sheep, even domesticated dogs.
It’s about cliff
dwellings, how the Ancient Ones
huddled together—under a wall
of sheer rock—
a brief moment,
a pottery shard,
a glint of mica in the sand.
Matins
At the table with sun I describe rain.
At the pier, I am all that is hidden underwater.
In the boat, I am the empty hooks that hold the life raft.
On the wall, I am the hole where the ripped-out phone used to
be;
people talk to me.
It’s not whistle and wind,
all things in desert time.
It’s absence.
And choice.
And feeling not bleak, but silent.
Like the bell whose clapper
is packed carefully in the next crate,
tissue and shavings a cradle for its weight,
you are the instrument
and I the hollow metal jar.
And we are being shipped by freight
to a small monastery in Greece.
May this journey end in our coming together,
may it end with our singing.
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