DRAGON FIRE (POEM)

                                    Dragon Fire        

                         Winter Fire, southern Oregon

                         July 2002

We were mopping up burning stumps

along the line where crews before us –

and a shift in the wind –

had stopped the fire the day before.

Just inside the green, Derek scuffed with his boot

the brittle twigs and resinous fir and tamarack needles

on the forest floor. “You could light this stuff

with a popcorn fart,” he said in his Oklahoma twang.

A large event caught our attention.

Its effect was like that of some great sound,

though there was no noise but our tools

and voices.

We both looked to the west, where

the evening sky was exploding: swift billows

of gray/white smoke obscured the sun, which then

turned them red as they boiled

across the horizon. Other colors came.

We stopped work and stood, staring, mouths open.

“Toolbox is cookin’,” I said, naming the fire

that would join with this one a few days hence.

Sun and wind hammered clouds and smoke into

the greatest dragon the world has ever known.

Its scales were orange and black and purple,

with arc-welder yellow glinting

along its back, making a fiery outline

against the blackening western sky.

Each color pulsated from the violence

within the mass. Then the dragon convulsed

mightily, snapping its own spine

and screaming a scream not of sound,

but a scream of heat

a scream of shape

a great, world-wide scream

of writhing black and red and orange and purple and

molten-metal yellow against the indigo sky beyond.

A wind on quick feet

scooted out of the North

and slapped the dragon from the sky,

leaving only streaks

of ordinary cloud.

“You see some pretty strange shit out here,”

Derek said as we went back to swinging our Pulaskis

at smoldering stumps, and wondering if

anyone else had seen

the dragon, or if it had been

a private show.

©Dean Metcalf 2002,

August 3, 2007

SPIDER AND FLY

Spider and Fly

     I came home one afternoon in late 1976 to my house on Chestnut Street in Santa Cruz. I'd been working in the building trades since leaving the boats, and was trading work for rent, building my first complete house behind the one I lived in. I had recently gotten my general contractor's license.

     I walked across the living room, past the fireplace, and into the kitchen where sun was streaming in through the windows. I started putting groceries away in the fridge. The windows faced south, so that the afternoon sun warmed the red quarry tile floor and threw shadows of the windows' wooden bars and muntins into parallelogrammed patterns across the sink, stove, and countertop.      

     I lived alone. The kitchen was quiet. But I had just closed the refrigerator door when a loud buzz caught my attention from a lower corner of one of the windows. It was a big bluebottle fly, buzzing with such intensity that the sound filled the room. The fly was having trouble with a spider's web that was spun across the corner of the window. A small spider came scooting across the glass, waved its legs near the fly, backed away. I got a kitchen chair and moved it up to just beyond arm's length and sat down. 

     Obviously, it would be no contest. The web was no more than a few frail strands, not yet ready for a quarry   several times larger and more powerful than the spider, whose legs were nearly as delicate as the strands of its web. The fly still had both wings free, and was buzzing loudly, trying to get enough lift to pull its legs out of the web. 

     The spider darted out again, near the fly but just out of reach of its great thrashing wings. The spider waved its forward legs again, as if giving some arachnidic benediction, but from this close I could see the spider stretching a strand of web between its two forward legs, and offering that strand to the sacrificial buzz saw of the fly's wings. 

     The fly instantly snapped that strand, seeming not to notice it. It continued to struggle to free its legs, but could only free one leg by pushing at the web with another, which trapped the liberating leg. The spider pulled back, seeming to rest or to give up. But then it scooted forward again, and again offered its nettlesome benediction. As before, the fly snapped it immediately; as before, the spider backed just out of danger to rest, and to spin another strand. 

     The world's time - that is, time outside of what was happening in one corner of one pane of that old twelve-light double-hung window - began to dissolve for me. Minutes, or hours, might have passed. The battle became a ballet, a pas de deux between the raging fly and the tiny, impudent, darting spider, coming in with its frail monofilament offerings. The forcefield generated by their antagonistic movements drew me closer to the battle, seeming to magnify the two creatures. I began to see the motion of the spider's legs, as it attempted to lasso the fly with puny strands, as similar to the parenthetic arcs of a ballerina's arms in opposing crescents above her head during a pirouette. The fly became a furious neo-mechanical monster with blue and green and black metallic glints flashing off the segmented head and thorax, its translucent but formidable wings the instruments of its rage.      

     I leaned in closer. Now, among the flinty pulses of light being emitted by the writhing fly's body, a new source of color appeared. As the fly revved its wings, trying to get enough lift to pull itself free of the web that still held its legs, a quick tiny flash of rainbow would appear along the top edge of the fly's left wing, the one nearest the spider. The spider kept moving back, spinning, darting in with a new strand that the thrashing wing would instantly break. But the rainbow glints of light, refracted by the strands' residue on the fly's wing, came more often, lasted longer, and grew in size until a strand of web became visible between the wing and the body of the fly, darting violently with the wing's motion, snapping but then reconstituting itself as the spider added more material, until the strand became a cable, then a net, and that wing suddenly stilled, lashed now to the fly's body. The roar of the fly's wings was cut in half. The spider moved cautiously up on the disarmed side, threw a few more strands in place to make sure the wing was secure, then circled around to the fly's opposite side, patiently repeating the process until the great blue fly was trussed, immobile, silent. 

     "There it is," I said. "Vietnam." 

BATHING BEAUTIES (POEM)

                                    Bathing Beauties

                         Dean Metcalf©1985, 2012

Del Mar Beach,

California 1985

I.

Slipping sideways under Cinzano umbrellas,

afternoon sun hammers ice

through thin walls of tonic glasses,

extruding beads of limesweat.

Greased bodies sizzle,

layed out along the griddle

that is the continent’s edge:

so much sexual bacon.

In the outdoor shower,

bikinied teens preen,

already posing for Playboy.

At the steps to the beach,

where everyone can see,

a couple stand

so everyone can see.

He is tall, blond,

tan, seventeen.

His muscles are from play,

for playing with:

not from work,

not for working with.

She is shorter, blonde,

nubile, fourteen.

She wears four small triangles

     of blue cloth.

She wears her self-assurance

as if she had already done everything

the older men under the Cinzano umbrellas

     are wishing they could do with her

and found it amusing.

She tosses her hair,

turning to devour

the stares

that are devouring her.

                   

II.

She is eighty.

She walks with a cane.

She has trouble with the sand.

At the other end of her life,

the soft girl’s bones of her feet were

broken, toes bent back under the arch

to form the desired opening

for a highborn man’s erection, then bound

to heal, if that is the right word, into

a different kind of foot.

They are still bound,

her childhood trapped there

like butterflies pressed

in a book.

You can see

she loves the sun.

She walks carefully

past the perfect couple

past the sizzling Californians

lifting her withered face

pushing the cane with withered hands

down to where the salt foam

washes her shortened feet,

down to where one wave’s foam

smoothes the sand with its coming,

withers the same sand with its leaving,

the withered sand a mirror to her skin.

She lifts her face

smiles into the sun

smiles toward the West,

toward China.

                                   Dean Metcalf ©1985,2012

                                   P.O. Box 548

                                   Joseph OR 97846