Two Poems by James Ducat

Harrow 

(v. – 1. to level land and/or break up roots and clods; 2. to disturb painfully)

             “Below me treetops and a crow making its slow progress”

                                                                 -Gregory Orr, “The Cliff”

Below mockingbird frenzy of

mean circumstance, under the collapsed

treetops of my lung

and along furrows carved

across my heartland, a

crow, my crow, strings gut tight,

making punctured sound

its

slow harmonic

progression: subdominant, dominant, tonic.

**

The Argument

Wind, quit screaming.

My mother was a pipe organ, my father the tide.

I am sorry they left you out, next-door dogs.

My parents flung silence like dinner plates.

Seashell, can you skip like a stone?

The hole in my mother’s ear drowned her like one.

Swimming pool, ripple my skin.

My father lost religion in the surf.

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James Ducat is an MFA candidate at Antioch University LA and teaches English at Mt San Jacinto College and Beaumont High School in California. He has been published in Four and Twenty magazine.