Four poems by David Mason

Security Light

• The glow outside our window is no fallen star.
• It is futility itself. It is the fear of night
• a neighbor burns with, nightmare of a stubborn child.

• I dreamed of chasing crows in a dark of sea fog
• and no wind, the chill smell of kelp and changing things,
• knowing the sea’s edge and the sand met where the fish lived.

• I saw the waters running out to meet the water
• coming in, the small crabs lifted off their claws.
• I saw the trysting place of cormorants, the cliffs

• of guarded nests where eagles watched like sated kings
• alive, alive at the moving sand clock of the sea
• where all’s dissolved, where earth itself is taken down.

Frangipani

• Cut blossoms floating in a bowl of water
• are what they are. Someone saw and gathered
• the pale white and yellow stars and leaned

• intimately down. To know the fragile blooms
• with breathing color is to be reborn
• astir, astray and happier than before.

• They float to survive now, a mystery like the dead
• wake up to in the cradle of the night,
• flesh of frangipani sweetening the bed

• between the mown grass and the Southern Cross,
• and if the memory bleeds at such a loss
• it’s only the cost of living with desire.

• So let the sphinx moths hunting nectar there
• where none exists be go-betweens for life,
• purposefully duped. Let the perfume rise.

The Great Changer

• Without a song to find a lover by,
• some days she floated like a driftwood log,
• beached at high tide beneath a dismal sky.
• She was not Salmon Woman swimming under fog.

• She was not Echo, nor was she Talking River.
• She was not Thunder and she was not ever
• the mouse who changed her skin for woman’s skin.
• She was not Milky Way. She was not Moon.

• She had to move a mountain with a spoon
• and never ask forgiveness of the sun.
• When change came it was a gradual dying.
• She was not Owl Woman. This was not flying.

• But she was Fox and found her gnawed off limb
• and the Great Changer came. And she welcomed him.

Epigram

• The baby’s bawling and the old man’s laughter
• rise from the center of the same I am.
• Say it to windows, doors. Say it to rafters
• on rivers of light. Say it to the breaking dam.

David Mason was Poet Laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2015. His books include Ludlow: A Verse Novel, The Country I Remember, Arrivals, News from the Village, The Scarlet Libretto, Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade, 2004-2014, and Davey McGravy: Tales to be Read Aloud to Children and Adult Children. Mason divides his time between Colorado and Oregon.