Nate maxson
p o e t r y
Light Pollution/ Ariadne
A skull and bones wing-pattern coat jumps
Lives, running inside a flicker
Flight evolved out to a memory,
A rediscovery
All across the American veldt
The eyes of those who looked
Too long into daylight
Are rolling back white in their heads
The stars are disappearing
To light pollution
(a toast)
They say
You could once see the Milky Way
Zoom in from that wide lens,
That general negation
To a motion that sparks and sways
To watch what moves across the streetlamp
Like a spotlight on a stage
One breath and then it’s gone
Arrhythmia and the labyrinth
An optical illusion
But a convincing one
A hieroglyph of matches
Erasure
Of what you used to see
It’s a slow death
A macular degeneration
Lit by children
We know it
The way we know without saying it
That all dogs are born, orphans
When we see a shape hopping shadowy
Across the empty, tumbleweed filled canals
These long legged nights of the drought
Colorblind snipers
Firing into the dark
The Mirror Tarot: Unsafe Wiring
The twins:
This is my card
It depicts Hercules in the underworld
Only his mortal shade though
The divine part
Split like an atom
Which part remembers?
One underground
Stays behind to warn Odysseus on the shoreline of Tartarus
And one above
The earth is a mirror beneath our boots
The snowshoed hare:
This is your card
Its mouth is ringed red from an unknown trespass
On a slower animal
Nose twitch/ lick lips/ how they move
Small footprints in the snowdrift
A pastoral vanishing
Like Hemingway’s baby shoes
An urban legend
The only evidence
Last card: Gehenna
The echo and the daylight
The dust
Ovens so big and so seldom fired
There are black birds nesting in the crooks
The Mirror-Tarot: Cold Reading
The Elephant Graveyard
A major arcana
A bonfire licking at the night sky’s soft blue underside
Men with gloved hands warm themselves on its border
Faces smoky and scarved
When they catch the poachers
They burn them like witches on pyres of ivory
That one is for the past
Now the present moment enters the frame
The Queen Of Lilies
This is your card
Her face emerges
Unscratched from a bramble
In each hand she has an apple
Then the branches close in and her face vanishes
Cheshire cat-like
She closes each hand and the apples blink out too
Hands withdraw
Only a breeze
Try to remember
Where those gold apples bloomed to the touch
Now the future: muddiest of all the waters
Seven Of Crows
A floating city
Where no one talks
It’s Venice in reverse
It lifted off the ground one day
Rose an inch a year
Grew like a child
That way
They hope the crows
Eventually
Pull them back to earth
Like so much smoke
Where a large shape went crashing
Through the trees
Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry, he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.