scott burnam

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Juniper

you teach us the Diné word ‘yíiyáh’

your wise, wrinkled face

giggling as our white tongues

struggle to break from

their midwestern roots

to form the shape of your word

you say it means ‘scary’

and that the juniper seeds

on this blue beaded bracelet

will ward off bad spirits

and prevent nightmares

no matter the wearer’s age

you knot the leather snugly

around my sunscreened wrist 

and taking my hand between yours

close the canyon 

carved between us

by my colonial ancestors

with smallpox-laced blankets

and tribal schools and sins 

on the soil where we stand

you add with a wink

this warning:  that it won’t help with

rattlers if worn on the ankle

and as your organic grace

pits in my stomach

I bend toward better energies

How The World Tasted

Sharman’s apricot tree sends its branches 

weighted with fruit into the heaven’s wideness.

Summer after summer, we sit in the lap of its shade, 

ripe fruit falling, stories from the year gone tumbling out.

Climbing the ladder, I step inside the ancient branches,

the fruit bursting in cabochoned yellow clusters, 

and peer through to the sky’s lapis blue. How easily 

the fruit falls into my reaching hand, limb after limb 

letting go its sweetness without effort. We pick bags full, 

juice oozing through the paper, carry them into the house. 

Sharman turns them into gifts preserved in jars, gives me pints 

to carry home, friendship doled out in spoonfuls—perfume 

rising from pancakes months later half a world and oceans away. 

An enormous apricot, the sun travels through the sky.

Bite after bite, we eat our days down to their final seed.

When we arrive there, we will want to remember 

how the sky looked from inside those weathered branches, 

how the world tasted when it gave us its sweetest fruit

before we toss the seed into the earth 

and cover it forever.

Neap Tide

A long pull outward

silent and unstoppable

the ocean exhales

Down past the blades of sea grass, stepping though the gentle pop of bladderwort, then zone of barnacles and anemones with folded arms, toward tissue-thin sea lettuce draped on just-bared sand. Now, at the tideline, the land is muted. It’s the ocean’s turn to speak. The sparrow’s voice is drowned by the waves’ rhythmic stroking of eelgrass tresses. Further now, where stringy dreads of kelp lie smothered in eggs, those glistening pearls, some to thrive and some the fill the humpback’s maw. Cockles explode with brine beside the empty shells of their kin. Here, a crow’s three-toed print tells of the ever-hungry belly. The sea is hungry, too — yesterday’s boot prints will be gobbled up, while fresh water tumbles on its way to salty oblivion. And here slumps a pouch of orange-pocked flesh, the cucumaria, sifting mouth stilled, soft tentacled feet curled beneath. Yes, sorrow for a sea cucumber.

Minus tide in June

the pathway only minutes wide

inhales life and death.

Off the Coast

The waves fling themselves against the stoic cliff.

Generated a thousand miles away, they race toward annihilation

eternally land against water and a sailor’s nightmare.

But not to these, the lions of the sea.

We watch in terror as they practice acrobatics,

the surf their undomesticated playground.

Flip and twist, dive and leap, plunging into power

not for food, not for survival, but because sheer animal exuberance demands it.

No fear, only joy. What else can it be?

They face the feral element, toy with it, use it for purest pleasure.

We long for such perfect harmony of body and mind that we might

throw ourselves into our terrors, launching with a strong heart

and let them batter us til we find we can indeed ride them, propelled by intent and luck, 

to another place.

Of Autumn - (i) Evening Grosbeaks 

I wander, wondering, in my own Autumn, my hair 

flecked colorless, remember old poems of Autumn.

They flash canary thoughts inward where I walk

under a canopy of yellow Maples, bright as our

local songbirds—Warbler, Goldfinch, Evening Grosbeak.

Some years the Grosbeaks are missed, and others

bring vast irruptions caused by poor cone crops

further north of us, here in Toronto. In early 

October you might see them everywhere, jumbled 

in fluttering groups at feeders. Their calls,

piercing as the yellow rain-slick leaves against 

the cast iron fence and black trees of the park.

These follow away from me in all directions,

nature’s own naves conceived of a sacred need—

From where does this conception grow? Paradise

is an overused altar for this solution to dying.

I know and ask myself such things as I imagine

slow words to a lost song, a substance devoid

of any surfaces, the lines of a warm excitement felt 

that press my senses outward, are the recognition 

of an unnamed thing that wonders, lives within me. 

So I poke around it here with a remembered birch stick 

from my garden, that I keep to poke around with.

Of Autumn - (ii) Gingkoes 

I can describe what’s sacred without pawing the air.

The maples are as they are without any tinkling of bells

or inked float of incense smoke to choke me,

or my mind, following the Chan monk’s lines of a painting

where its own accumulations describe yet another sacredness,

or the ginkgoes, poised with the flutter of yellow fans, 

the ground a yellow walk under black-branched arch,

the monastery’s aesthetic, also in me. Paradise 

has so many outward forms, painted and described

in poems like this. What can we know from crafted image?

We paint them with our own closed meanings—

The expected light that slips into cloud-shadow across 

a familiar street, under the rise of opening sky 

that springs away from me into another frame 

of childhood’s play in misremembered yard,

a suburban lawn, perfectly green, plastic soldiers.

While here, a violin pulls my nerves into a better 

version that again accumulates into my mother’s 

young face, or a friend who got lost with toys in a move. 

Where? But I’ve made another show of this unprovable, 

hidden thing, that writing about was intended to conceal.

Of Autumn - (iii) Wandering 

Those older slow, whiten in the moment, 

seek backwards again memory’s repeated skip—

Seated with her, she recounts the same child’s memories,

of life’s small pleasures, accomplishments, and hardships.

Mama let me stir the soup when I was eight.

(spoken happily, and then as if to balance this),

my real mother went to the hospital, she died of

the anesthetic. We used newspapers in the toilet.

Then with love speaks often of her own children, small.

She was a talker! She knew everything about everyone. 

Still does. Her child, now a mother, is worried 

about her own daughter, almost grown, alone

in a dark house in a storm, laughs back, saying

But she’s my baby! She will always be my baby!

As Aeneas embraced his father’s shade, already 

fading as all love’s memories must, but revived

in this other world and brightened in the telling.

Wondering how long even this can stretch, 

the stark trees stripped bare now, harshen us 

into ourselves again, storing fresh memories 

like pickled beets, bloody, tangy, alive, preserved 

to stain the whiteness of death. My heart clutches fear,

then I remember, I’m wandering through my own Autumn, 

my life plays in snippets as if edited from a film,

paradise thins as I slice onions or wash the dog.

I watch how I was, am, watching the last swallows 

like poems—They flit and glide across the river’s stretch, 

twittering over the little bridge as twilight seeps

downward to dusk and ghostly clouds of gnats come out.

Untitled

and who are we, now
To gather among pixel and pillow
what was told from at least a dozen perspectives
That to learn we must forget
Like a tree which has forgotten to drop its leaves
How silly of us; We hang on to our reality
As given
And constructed from that which is given
Further tear apart that thought
Find me heavy breathed - forgetting much detail
Detail being the fodder of stories
That which memory provides and lacks in entirety
The experience was nothing of the sort, real
Remembered and retold, translated through time
And faced with the fact
Of earth’s great upheaval
Remember now once again
How you were as a child

After The Fight

I love the way wind blows over the pond—

our daughter says Oh, I get it now—

Every year the reeds turn rainbow     in the fall.

I rinse soap from a bone plate scattered with blue rabbits.

The reeds are russet-tipped, golden, and green.

You take the children to hike the mountain

that will be closed all autumn.

How can they close a mountain? you ask, 

I pour coffee. Add the milk the way you like

and hand it to you. The children hike

all morning in the glorious dry warmth

of late September. There are no more blueberries

they tell me, when they come home,

though the baby searched and searched

under all the same bushes.

I know the bushes were redding their leaves

like split berries      I know the birds we listened to

all summer     were whirling in the currents

above the little mountain, getting ready

to leave us. I know the sky swirled and I know you

carried the baby back down 

with his head on your shoulder when

his legs got tired. I didn’t come.

I stayed home and worked, cleaned,

felt angry about the fight,

but not angry about you.

Platypus

Is it even possible to know    a mother?     What line is there

between mammal and bird,     the brown fur thick as a penguin’s pelt

eggs born   with pups inside   slicked   in yolk and blood.    I could be venomous 

                                                                                                         as a reptile, too

fangs in my heels         ready to be changeable:     bird,  mother,  mammal,  snake

scales slip and split      into feathered hairs and     webbed skin stretches. 

The secretive bill noses through     waterweeds in an unlit river. 

So, like the dreams of mothers:    curl of hot breath between poured tea and its cup

thrum of non-sound     in the moment  before     car door opens to children,

wink of non-light between     unlit river and its unlit clouds— 

I saw one once, in a huge tank:    a mother, in the dark, barely lit

with blacklight as she went about her secret tasks,

webbing fumbling in the space where mud talks to hairline water licks,

mouth    telling a story   while mind takes a beat.

Imagine how the fur must flash for a moment in the moon              like spurs 

                                                                                                                         waiting in the dark

Future Folk Tales: Bones

One night he camped on dark sand beneath a whale’s ribcage.

Listening to the waves repeat themselves 

he remembered how people cried and fled as the waves

brought their story closer and closer, not trying to be understood,

just speaking as they always had.

Sadness carved his throat. All around him the whale’s ribs a tender memory 

of enclosure, the safety of a massive heart. The waves 

telling of the whale’s first thrashing in infancy and how they washed 

her body at the end. He cried until one of the ribs woke 

and sang to him an echoing song, a keening lament that billowed

into an exultation of wind and the tracery of starlight which bones wait a lifetime to know.

Future Folk Tales: Luna Moth 

There was too much light. She fluttered madly

in the street, rested on a windshield. She was wildest

velvet and lost. The busy wind pulled at her and

it seemed she panted. Again she threw herself to air, 

skittered to the ground. We ran after her, tried to shelter 

her with our hands, exclaiming – lime wings studded

with golden eyes, tapering to ribbons. Closer, she said,

see how I spin confusion. Bats miss me. The wind sings 

strung gold through my antennae. This is my fourth 

and final form. I am softest and most difficult. Closer,

she said, her voice the savage joy of seven days’ flight

before the end. You are so close. Smash the lights. 

Learn the difference between your touch and death.

Future Folk Tales: Saharan Dust

(with thanks to Richard Adams)

In a copper sunset I shook dust motes from my clothes, 

pinging hard ground with tiny diamonds, blinding scintillations 

bouncing then pouring themselves into the shape of a gazelle.

News, said the gazelle, news! The firefinch is thriving. Nothing 

is separate from anything else. The desert flings itself across the ocean 

and lands at your feet, scrubs at your hair, and I have come to tell you 

only this. I live with scorpions and drink no water. He spun apart.

Still spinning now sparkling in the dying light, News, cried the dust, 

all around me, news! We travel in plumes, we span. Dunes, our sculpture. 

Our music stings your ears. We trap the sun, shade oceans. You shook us 

and we danced the shape of our most graceful. Gazelle treads lightly,

he knows how much we carry, how old we are. Believe us when we 

cover you. We have traveled every mile there is to rest here on your 

shoulders, to fill your lungs with our cunning lightness. We know 

your thirst: we made it. But the journey of your slaking has no end.

Bar Parking Lot Filled With Who I Used To Be

So the music’s kind of muffled out here

and I’m sitting quiet as the girls wander

looking as if something important

is about to happen.

And the guys follow expecting that

something important is about to happen

and their voices over the music

are more important so maybe that’s all 

that is supposed to happen.

And everyone who I used to be 

is this side of having a good time:

this man-child who starts to beer weep,

and the girl who has no septum left

laughs between sets, reaches for her limit 

like arms of a comic book elastic man hero.

Maybe she cries when the poet’s words 

crawl up her skirt, grab the golden ring

between the clefts, pull hard enough

to remind her she’s not immune;

and the lights and mic and amps

wait for the moments to spit out

poets into a bar parking lot

wait to explode messages of things gone bad

and the curly hairs of maybe love braided into words

and everyone still wanders in the bar parking lot.

Breasts and tattoos beckoning

calling loudly, smiling large,

practice their self-importance

which is a good thing because with any luck 

tomorrow is a long journey.

I want to tell them in the bar parking lot

that is filled with the who I used to be.

Buy the memories the hawkers are selling;

keep them precious, they have magic to spark 

a cautious love, a smile for the you of then,

take what is offered for free, it’s all good.

One More Pale Room

Who would put women

desperate for good news

into this small windowless,

mushroom walled, pale green room?

There is a cold fluorescence here

as if hope were diluted with bleach

then left to dry hard,

all suppleness and light wrung out

like an overused dishrag;

nothing to brighten the mood,

not even the glare of sterile white

only a dullness to match the walls,

the floors, the cabinets;

muted voices, muffled conversation

from the room next door

where the news is delivered

like dispensations from a priest,

resonant, serious, unblinking

as if our bodies confessed their deeds

and were now told the price they would pay

regardless of sins or not for which to atone.

Waterlogged

High tide, the ocean covers

the sand all the way back

to the salt weathered fence.

The water keeps rising —

I stand cold, knee deep,

I have lost something,

I watch immobile

as the sea cast gray green, 

deliberately swells,

buries bits of life stuff 

on plastic pieces,

on cardboard cards.

What am I supposed to do

to save all the things

that name me, tell who I am

or am supposed to be?

All my facts replaceable

if only I knew which they were.

And I am crying— panicked

my numbers will never be found.

The water sucks back into itself 

as if it has forgotten something.

Alone on a flooded beach

I don’t know how to restart, 

reassemble the pieces,

my identity fragmented now

under the weight of waterlogged sand;

I cannot move but neither have I drowned.

Confessional Poem #1

well & these were houses

        we met on the rodeo circuit 

                or it settled in their bones

                or it surfaced downwind of the incinerator 

                or in dreams of eastern Europe 

        there is a world behind this world

                 & it’s the same world

exuberant in our despair

         lichen staining the parapets

rituals of extraction              ghost locusts

          a panoply             a topos            antic souvenirs 

I didn’t want to remember America that way 

         no one wanted to be kissed 

good kings & truly 

abstracted or remanded

from fragments of Anaxamander 

an excommunicator, I forget

        the dead don’t need houses or aquifers 

                lunging transmission         a failing lamp

                last unpartitioned 

                stand of sky

Sonnet (By Reason of Mountains)

by reason of mountains & drowned lands

the outlook for begging has never been brighter

in the new personalist economy

Thursday’s child went under a car & came out a walrus

& the sky was bluer than the trompe l’oeil sky in the theme park restaurant

the milfoil, the spleenwort & dwarf willow

whole cemeteries denuded

earlier epochs stacked in grayscale 

the pugilist’s gal, her putative hysteria

an album of consumptive memories

cryptid pneumonia

tomorrow or the next day

a feeling tone meditation

after I wasn’t Reznikoff

Sonnet (In the State of Good Repair)

in the state of good repair

in a peaceable kingdom 

in a story from the Hadean Eon I don’t feel like telling

on the undercard under karst in a prado 

vestigial lanolin derivative 

sous l’appellation d’origine contrôllée 

at the junction of four nerves of the aster 

in a manner of speaking in the interest of time 

universal eschatology fart module 

in the event of my expulsion from this body 

perfected, in tatters

in a lab that time forgot

per the dark energy budget of the observable universe 

as the man with open sores persisted in tuba jokes

Another Season of the Great British Baking Show

This morning in Seabrook, Market Basket went into lockdown,

shoppers herded to the rear of the store, crowding against

meat cases, thinking: Jesus, this is happening to me now. 

Happening as they pass rib roast, top roast, stew chunks, 

and crowd into the storeroom which, thanks to something

to do with longshoremen and truck drivers, can accommodate.

Happening during a dessert week of pavlova—alpine swirls, lakes 

filled with mascarpone, chantilly cream, and mango coulis.

We learn there are a thousand ways meringue can go wrong.

A thousand ways a day becomes rerouted, sectioned like

the map-of-states diagrams of beef cows: brisket, short loin, 

foreshank. First an errand, then a lesson on the science of collapse. 

Luck Is Blind and So Is Summer

I don’t dream of midsummer, Fortune wielding her horn of plenty,

shielding her own eyes.

Don’t long for a meadow of crickets amplifying their music

through some freak physiological function of their startling bodies.

Everything out there furs, seeks heat, latches on, engorges.

Even the moon is all yolk, over hard. 

The landscape is understory and overgrowth. 

Everything requires beating back.

No sir. I don’t need to feel the bite or the slither or the ooze. 

Fortune, like this season, is capricious. I want the predictable cold,

a killing frost, a leafless view of what the hell is out there. 

The High School Principal Moves to Town and Goes for a Swim, Pandemic Summer

He rises from the sea, this man whose soon-to-be-ex wife 

lets him sleep in the back yard with his sons. And then what, then where?

Rip tides. Bow tie collection. The fumigation of doorknobs.

He thinks of all this or nothing of this. The water is cold,

as nerve-jangling as rumors of a red head. 

He thinks of his wife behind the plate glass that morning.

Unshatterable woman-stranger. 

His son who once refused to wear a collared shirt to a dance.

How there will be now, no dances.

This week of Perseid showers he missed because: clouds. 

Residents see him in their ocean. Strange. Naked

as the scrotum-esque neck of clams.  

Integumentary, one mother thinks. Another shrinks away

from his canines.

Their daughters intuit something

                is missing. It stirs

                pity

pity—for a man whose pronunciations, whose Jeep truck, 

whose madras pants, they’ve spent August excoriating.

The daughters seek the source of their softening, these sea beasts 

bent on breathing. 

What makes them watch him wash ashore 

like the lowliest freshman? What’s missing?

Then they know, oh yes,

and say aloud  

                : his glasses.

In a wave, it returns as he stands before them, flesh goosepimpling: 

their reclaimed and fiercely coddled abhorrence.

Collage                 

                —after Romare Bearden

Gather out of star-dust:

memories of tender Harlem evenings where portraits filled

my young mind with jazz. And we stayed awake late nights

in our rented place on West 131*t Street laughing and 

talking the talk. DuBois, Hughes, Ellington. The gatherings

when I heard their stories, the abstract truth, scientific in grandeur 

yet ever so real, down to earth, stories of Time and then,

the soothsayers, the truthsayers, singing their jogo blues.

Silence willfully broken. Scrapbooks of faded brown photographs, 

clippings from Ebony and Jet. Folks dancing the original 

Charleston, the fine old step, the swing and the sway.

Gather out of moon-dust:

There was crisis and opportunity. Black new voices, new forms. 

Voices of folk singing real soft and mellow.

Lessons on how to become a “real poet,” while Claude McKay 

joined the Russian Communist Party. Fire from flint.

Letters were penned by Countee Cullen to Langston 

Hughes. Shadows reigned over the evening skies of 

Harlem.

Gather out of sky-dust:

a time for the “new negro.”

For Pullman porters to unionize

and for Josephine Baker, chanteuse extraordinaire, to 

exercise her wings of gossamer silk and satin.

Music warbled from an ebony flute

while poor folk sold their fine clothes to the 

Jews. Was Christ Black?

Do angels really play trombones for God 

in a black/brown heaven?

Gather out of song-dust:

Did we owe it all to Spingarn, Knopf or Van Vechten? 

Or was originality and improvisation our sacred 

creed?

As I gazed from the window at the skies

of my fading youth, all I could see was fire.

I wanted to hear the Blackbirds Orchestra wild on a Saturday night. 

To hear “Go Down Moses” sung in church on a Sunday morn.

Wanted  a  style  of  my 

own. To become Emperor 

Jones. Daddy Grace.

The Painter

You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and 

below, the prayer like paper, the light illumined all our sacred 

trees.

Somehow, we forgot all our raucous and joyous past loves 

when I asked you to listen for the screen door's slam

and the call to supper as I brought you the evening meal.

And then there was that folio of your recent sketches. 

So many similar dark faces filled with joy.

I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page,

a man's tortured face, his beard, his glowing tough bronzed skin. 

You said it was a portrait of your brother,

who died overseas during a rain of fire in the Viet Nam war.

And you put down your brushes to confess 

we were going to start life all over again

without waging the private wars that keep us together.

You painted your dead brother's face

against a background of blue. 

Renunciation

As much as the seduction

Of an Exotic car collection

An architect’s dream house

And a former national miss wife

An infinity pool to the horizon

A bowling alley in the basement

Financial advice that is always right

Making a fortune on the mass’s losses

And always with an opinion

That silences the room full

Of them with a piece of you

Drinks on the deck at sunset alone

(Unless you want company)

And legions waiting in the lobby

An hour before you pull up only

to be told no appointments today

Sotheby’s holding the Matisse

For the check and the drive

To the former president’s country house

And the south wall of the den-

They all will join as rainbows.

As much as all things mental

Serve only the Greater Self

And visualize celestial mansions

Filled with a million stolen ideas

Packaged as sharing for the good

seized just before the masses pass

Such is the genius in grasping

And the certainty charged by the month

No sooner sign on than see dividends

That will all join as rainbows.

As much as all things of passion

And all the love given without end

Bathe countless beings known and unknown

In the eternal bliss of the moment

For which no one gets credit

the commentators can only speculate

On how it all joined as rainbows.

As much as the titan of industry

Claims he has the backers to front

The sky as the next major commodity

And infinite potential becomes 

the catchphrase of the month 

so even the pole dancers will know

how all have joined as rainbows.

Isis

I remember when I was a goddess.

How good I was at making beer!  And weaving

the softest of blankets to line baskets

for babies.  No, nothing of mine saved 

in museums, but one or two maybe tucked

in trunks.  You mothers know what I mean.

In my own trunk, one golden sheath

from the days when I lived in the holy of holies

when priests would dress a wooden doll

of me.  The last one, now lost.

I drape the sheath between palms

that still hold the power to guide you along

the darkest paths, to remove your fear.  I am here.

My palms, lit lamps, touch your cheeks.

Even if nothing of mine remains,

I remember every day I was a goddess.

Back when your world loved women.

Just Under the Skin of Water 

               -   for Sol Neely

The spinner dolphins leap, pulsing through water,

        and in our throats, on the boat, rising in an October swell

                just off the coast of Lanai.  Diving boat, blue water, breath.

Every morning I wake and remember:  my friend is dead.

        Hiking alone in the hot hills of Washington, where he didn’t belong,

                a thousand miles from home, his phone

shows he saw a doe, a winding dusty trail, the view from the top.

        His young, unsmiling face, braid covered in a bandana

                just before his large Cherokee heart stopped. Impossible.

Just after the dolphins pass us we learn someone’s been left

        in the water, a man from another boat, and we start looking—

                eyes combing the blue sea, as if we were 

searching in the cushions of God’s blue couch, lifting each wave again

        and again, none of us sure what happened, what is happening

                even now. There’s a person in the water?  Impossible.

The spinner dolphins are back.  He would have loved the way

        they race the bow of our boat, back and forth just under

                the skin of water, just one breath away from being hit.

Then we see it:  a man waving.  We pull him aboard, learn he’s crew

        from another boat, learn that a diver was left underwater for 7 minutes.

                We learn that boat raced home:  radio calls, CPR, breath.

Hard not to imagine his beautiful face pressed to the dust

        of that trail, his braid starting to come undone.  I see instead

                that doe, standing over him, her two-pound heart, pumping.

I see instead the people on the other boat, one after another—an auntie, 

        a teenage boy, even a ten-year-old girl—taking turns pumping his heart,

                blowing breath in his lungs for the hour-long trip to the dock

even as I know, it’s impossible.  Underwater for 7 minutes, lying in the dust

        for hours.  But now:  on our boat everyone puts on diving gear, talks about  

                how many minutes of air.  Reefs, fish, octopus, breathing.

This morning I wake, my hands reaching through the flat white sea

        of the bed, the memory of a spinner dolphin, a leap in throat

                before I remember.  Before I have to try, again, for wonder.