2 Poems by David Chorlton

Spring Day at Spur Cross
 
Light runs dry along the creek bed
where rocks are ground fine
enough to hold the tracks
a cat made in the night
when it came down from the hard
escarpment whose edge
streams against the sky.

Cactus wrens call
across the purple dust,
desert broom and mallow
all the bright hours long

and the flicker makes a nest
in the cool, damp core of a dark saguaro.


The Monarchs

            The numbers are getting so slow now that the migratory phenomenon  of the monarch is becoming endangered. It is looking like the glorious  migration phenomenon will begin to peter out.
                                                                                -- Lincoln Brower, March, 2013

In the genetically modified universe
stars have become indestructible
and life is returning to Mars.
Infinity has opened its portals
to the traffic from Earth
whose insatiable appetite drives
a migration the like
of which never occurred
to the nomadic tribes who move
with the seasons, the whales whose journey
takes them to an ocean’s end,
or godwits crossing the Pacific
in a single flight without land
on which to rest. The sky flexes
like a muscle. Evolution moves
on overdrive, but still cannot
keep pace with human wants.
A tide of comet tails passes over us,
brighter each night,
while on a Mexican tree
the last Monarchs cling to the bark
in a trembling mass.


Bionote

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in1978. He pursued his visual art and had several shows as well as writing and publishing his poetry in magazines and collections, the latest of which is The Devil’s Sonata from FutureCycle Press. Although he became ever more interested in the desert and its wildlife, the shadow side of Vienna emerges in his fiction and The Taste of Fog, which was published by Rain Mountain Press.