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Christianne Balk
The Breeze Nudges Junipers, Promising
cool air soon. Forget the talk of Grandpa’s
tests, doctor this and doctor that, grown-ups
casting glances at the Atlas of the Human Body
left open on the kitchen counter all day, road
maps networked in red and blue around a place
none of us knew, broken pumps, melted casings,
forty acres left so dry the cattle lay down
motionless. Birds panting. Remember the dust
devils dancing in the driveway? Their swirling
made you laugh. Now you cry for Daddy’s-Daddy
as if he’s gone somewhere. The branches outside
our window move between us and the moon
pulling us together in a waving,
underwater web of shadow and light, rocking
both of us towards the man whose heart
ticks at the center of this house. Grandpa’s
okay now, sleeping in the room
next to ours. If you close your eyes you might
see the jagged mountains we flew above to get
here, new green softening the edges of the ash
slopes rimmed with trees laid down in rows,
polished silver by the heat. Drift down, sleep-
winged cottonwood seed, count miles of open ditches
carrying the Deschutes to pastures filled
with sage, green rabbit brush, fescue, thistle,
bitter brush, manzanita, and wild rose. The pig
bends her legs and slowly sinks into her wallow.
The gray-mantled ground swallow burrows deep,
curling close to cool roots. The chickens cluck
around brimming pails. Slow-eyed horses lower
their muzzles into troughs and the grownups stop
pacing the living room as if it were an airport.
In your sleep, see us fill your glasses with
clear water pulled from lava rock six hundred
feet below, talking lazily of water rights, as if
tonight we were any night, all of us together.
-from Desiring Flight
BIO: Christianne Balk is the author of Desiring Flight (Purdue UP) and Bindweed (Macmillan), which was awarded the Walt Whitman Award for 1985. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, The Atlantic, Harper's, Willow Springs, and Alaska Quarterly Review.
