Two Poems

Shawn Pittard

Fall Creek

There’s a door in the bottom of the freestone stream
at the bend below the railroad grade. 
On my birthday, I dared to open it, figuring
I’d lost most of what I had to lose by fifty.
Under the door, the water was drinkable,
like it was when I was a boy scout.
Crayfish still crawled everywhere.
A speckled trout swam by
with my lost hook in its mouth.
My front tooth sparkled in the gravel bed
near the piece of my right knee the orthopedist removed.
My dog’s front leg was down there, too, lost
when chasing horses into traffic on Las Flores.
I found the years my brother lost to heroin
entangled with my parents’ savings
and the confidence my sister locked
outside the gates to her community.
The Navajo girl I wanted to lose my virginity with
was lovely as the last time I saw her—
sitting politely with her host family in church.
The luster of her black hair
more mysterious underwater.
I found my fear of dying
and someone I assumed was God tried to catch my eye.
I feigned fascination with the pocketknife
my father-in-law gave me one Christmas.
It had rusted considerably.
Later that day, fishing downstream
in the moonrise, I wished I’d said something
to the twin sister
all boys are told to bury at their birth.

***

Laughing at the Moon

                                         When I was a black bear
I made rough love with a cinnamon sow     
                                                                  right here
at the edge of this bunch grass meadow
under the same moon
                                    that waxes in the pine tops
thrashing in the wind that rushes down the mountain
                    the same moon
whose light washed over my musky hide
washes my bare skin tonight.

Shawn Pittard is the author of These Rivers—a chapbook of poems from Rattlesnake Press. His poems, book reviews and stories have appeared in Chrysalis Reader, Confrontation, North American Review, Runes, Web del Sol Review of Books, and elsewhere. He writes a column for Rattlesnake Review and co-wrote a screenplay, Junk Sick, with his brother, Trent. Shawn also writes about his backcountry amblings at www.theserivers.blogspot.com.

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