A Brief Ecclesiastes
6-Poem Microchapbook by B. J. Buckley 2024
free download from www.origamipoems.com
Flyover Country by B. J. Buckley
Flyover Country is available from Pine Row Press, www.pinerow.com, Amazon, or directly from the author. Email her at wild4verses@yahoo.com
Vixen Song
Fox-haunted fields, autumn, the leaves red
ghosts: blood, hunt-stain, bright hunger,
that low-slunk undulation through fading
grasses, slick slither in and out of cattails
in the borrow ditches, fur flash, death's
soft frame. Mouse, vole, pocket gopher,
pheasant chick, bug and beetle, sweetest
berries bears forgot to pick, fallen apples
and their worms, the fields' waste: trampled
barley, broken corn, seed from sunflowers
drying on their stems: nothing spurned.
At last light, foxing on a page of heavy frost,
straight quick line, her tracks: she passed so
close, incendiary, and her wild breath burned.
Night Music by B.J. Buckley
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Playing the Nocturnes, # 6 in G minor
At twilight, the owls’
assertive questioning –
from the pine near the cabin, one call
immense and pitched low,
a cello;
from the aspens an adolescent,
cocky, but undone
by a voice that cracks suddenly
into the upper registers:
squeaky, out-of-tune
clarinet. Undaunted
clarinet. It goes on and on and
on, all night, this dozens game
high in the snowy trees,
this awkward uneven pleading
of desire.
The female’s somewhere, listening.
She could be in the next county
and she’d still hear them!
Choose, sweet one.
All of us could use a juicy mouse
and some sleep.
available from author at wild4verses@yahoo.com
Cover Illustration by Dawn Senior-Trask
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