Elegy for the West
–For J.
Windows stay dirty for months; belts of storms
shotgun against them, loud like little brothers.
The night pulls June bugs from out the mouths of hills.
The Russian olive for windbreak, rain dark as pitch
where houses toddle on stilts to avoid the wash,
where violence sits across from every victim, feeds each
one wooden spools of wire to stitch up the graves inside.
Twelve years later, the same April shoots of primrose
sleep under starved cloud, forget and forget themselves
in the spaces between all the names for empty
that will never fill. These hills still sink and redden,
flush as clay in places under the granite fist of boulder
where the bracken of hands refuse to dig. In late winter
lamplight, winds from the haunted north hum
the darkness will nick your fingers into cheatgrass,
my darling, and I knew it to be just true enough
to keep my knuckles tucked. I watched the hill
thieves as a boy, and the Black Crowned Night
Heron, too, lulled to sleep by a quarter moon,
thirsting. Outside the windows, a coyote chews a ghost
bleached bone in a desert that reaches into nothing.
Under this hard skin, life is buried young, unable
to push back against what moves through its children,
too soon to know the difference between our coins
and their eyes. Often,
we are ribboned into a knothole of memories that tie
us to the last unburned aspens – they rake in the sky,
like mother – with the great choiring of leaves.
by Arian Katsimbras
Windows stay dirty for months; belts of storms
shotgun against them, loud like little brothers.
The night pulls June bugs from out the mouths of hills.
The Russian olive for windbreak, rain dark as pitch
where houses toddle on stilts to avoid the wash,
where violence sits across from every victim, feeds each
one wooden spools of wire to stitch up the graves inside.
Twelve years later, the same April shoots of primrose
sleep under starved cloud, forget and forget themselves
in the spaces between all the names for empty
that will never fill. These hills still sink and redden,
flush as clay in places under the granite fist of boulder
where the bracken of hands refuse to dig. In late winter
lamplight, winds from the haunted north hum
the darkness will nick your fingers into cheatgrass,
my darling, and I knew it to be just true enough
to keep my knuckles tucked. I watched the hill
thieves as a boy, and the Black Crowned Night
Heron, too, lulled to sleep by a quarter moon,
thirsting. Outside the windows, a coyote chews a ghost
bleached bone in a desert that reaches into nothing.
Under this hard skin, life is buried young, unable
to push back against what moves through its children,
too soon to know the difference between our coins
and their eyes. Often,
we are ribboned into a knothole of memories that tie
us to the last unburned aspens – they rake in the sky,
like mother – with the great choiring of leaves.
by Arian Katsimbras
Arian Katsimbras is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech and earned his BA from the University of Nevada-Reno where he studied creative writing. He has served as Poetry Editor for the minnesota review, Assistant Editor for The Brushfire, has been a recipient of the DQ Poetry Award and the Surprise Valley Writer’s Conference Scholarship, and served as a Nevada Poetry Out Loud Competition judge in 2012. He has had poetry published or forthcoming in The Meadow and THRUSH, and is a contributing writer for Nevada Humanities.