David Axelrod


All the Way


At the frontier you’re crossing
Together, you measure your days
In chickadees who hover
Just above your open hand.
The clench you felt all the way
Through the exiles of middle age
Eases. Just the same, it’s slow going
In narrow boots, the murmur
In the left ventricle, the horses
bogged down, chest-deep in snow.
Sow us, seeds keep saying,
And we’ll glow slowly as hair
All the way darkward to December.
In her seventieth year, a wave
Passed across her face and the girl
You never knew resolved as a chord.
The moon climbed from the river
And there she was above you,
Loosening her hair at home
Forty years ago, in a room
Flooded to its sills in blue.

Sequoia Smoke


The rain this fall didn’t come in time,
So we breathed the smoke
From groves 3,000 years old.
We could see plumes of it
Streaming north, a blue haze
Hanging over the valley, a greasy film
Floating on the lake. After frost
A frenzy of bees covered rosemary
And mountain thyme. Bending close,
We felt the tremor of wings
Shimmer on our faces, a breath
Faint as twilight inflecting a wall.
How do we go on living like this
And not lose our minds? All night,
The full moon lights the meadow
We dream in, the trail and ghosts
The color of zinc, who pass in the dark.

 

David Axelrod teaches letterpress printing at the University of Montana on a 1935 Hacker Test Press and founded Bear Scratch Press. He’s the author of ten collections of poems, most recently, Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems (Blue Lynx 2024).

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