Mary Marie Dixon - Three Poems

Bone Breaker

The osprey slakes her cravings

On the dirk of a high crag

In that eyry tangle

The bone breaker’s lilac eggs

Ripen under her breast

Dark quills

Write in languages

And melodies long since lost

Indecipherable markings

Mapped in some vast

Expanse and suspended

Over ridge and rock

Cliff and bank

A wild place where

No one sleeps

The air is light

Some stroking thing

Is pent up under the eking tide

Which never quiets itself

Though it rocks incessantly

Instruction comes

Through the pillaging osprey

Whose lightning strike

Plunges, pocketing into the sea,

Emerges with squirming catch

And rises up

To pinnacle

The secret away

Brutal climber

Under the shadowy sky

Tear the trap away

Loose the long shadowed larch

Its pillar rots

Under the afflicted tree

The last quill falls

And August rides

The clouded sky

To a cornered world

The fish bellies up to the sun

Under the osprey’s wing.

Do not regret the deep

The cold and wild,

Where the rocks quiver,

The outspread beach wisps away.

No beauty lacks savagery,

Flinging itself,

Willing sacrifice,

Scattering the stalking prey,

Breaking only the wind.

Tortured on the low slope

Thick upon the briar,

A golden sun kisses the earth,

Bricking the friable loam,

Casting the badger’s den,

Kilning its burrow.

A heart loathes the common grain.

Piece by piece,

Under the spirit of the world,

It chokes and twists

To reconcile the soft lilac of the egg

And the predator’s talon. 

Channels

Fire cools

in thickened cellulose;

a winding blue

paths my body

and traces its edge.

I am the field

snaked with rivers,

plained by breath,

torpid languisher

in foxglove.

A crimson current,

made in marrow,

twines my bones

with cadent stripes.

Bay horses surge

like turbid muses

on this clay sprawl;

I am the track

that circuits their path.

Chambered by prairie dogs,

I am the burrowed ground

cloistered from the siege

of coyotes and badgers.

Iron fissures swirl

an alabaster shell;

spikenard ruptures

from broken vessels.

Anointing smears

the treasure.

So still, my skin,

yet fluxing within

I am vulnerable

to the blackberry,

and the sacred hawthorn

whose wood burns

with most virulent fire.

Disruption

In the cradle of the Manzanos and the desert

Watermelon mountains silent in pink afflicted by grey

I shook the solace of the leafing birch

Grasping for air, peeking through pay-for-use binoculars

The Rio Grande rose up a striking rattler

It was only the sound of cones falling from the Ponderosas

What will I do now?

Someday, I will know

How from one place to another

I move in ignorance from sea level to 5000 feet

Then unable to breathe realize the disruption

Mary Marie Dixon, visual artist and poet, has published creative works in periodicals and  collection of poetry, Eucharist, Enter the Sacred Way, Franciscan University Press, 2008. She explores the visual and poetic intersection in publications on women’s spirituality and the mystics, the Great Plains and the spiritual power of nature.