THREE POEMS by Dana Jaye Cadman

Lights Collapsing in the Tunnel We Go So Fast Through

The halogen flashes we go fast

We go and go and still we are not next to each other 
We’ve been all over the country together
and every place we’re farther from us

I wish love were obvious and not
this painful twig we hold between us
bending till it’s two twigs

Cataract

My cat’s eye’s gone gloss and tired. Mirror face. 
The marionette of light she kept bouncing 
in her skull has turned dull. She whines

at the end of the hallway for a door but won’t
come through one, and don’t we feel each of us
wanders behind a smoked up lens, deficient love
and clarity forsaken us. I watch the first snow

come onto winter and steam the glass, unfortunate. 
The flakes discern themselves against the weather.
The bird’s flight can be traced to an individual feather,
but we can’t find it. The cancer comes from one cigarette.

I don’t know how the ash goes melt on my palm.
What’s in me? What if there’s a fire in here and I can’t
get out. We’ve nailed the screens shut. My cat
scratches the kitchen tile to find her bowl, but it’s gone.

The Bull

In her violence she was almost a person
With withering hands and a tent in the wind
Snapped its poles in the Wyoming storm
And flung its stakes near enough to pierce the ground again

And her love walked up and over the wide boulders 
and past the glittering ground quartz (come up from where 
the earth had been opened by time)
And down by the stream where an angry bull
Was protecting his herd of women 

And the cows feared the strong wind and ran spooked deeper 
into the ravine where the man stood frightened and full of 
strong beer and the robot cried in her old Jeep missing him

It is the wind again which will carry the sharp things
And the wind pushed the 18 wheelers to sway like leaves 
in the wind and the wind which brought the lover back to her 

And when it calmed he cooked beef ribs over the fire and 
they played old music and did not speak
And the bull walked past a few times huffing
And far away a hawk cried but you could hear it 

While the ranch was quiet and the kindling cracked 
Somewhere there was a predator
The bones of snakes were everywhere and the clavicle of a deer