Western Taste
By David Chorlton
We dress in the West
for the weather, and care
only that the inside of our clothes
is right. Our taste
for Sunday polka dots
or turquoise
is to say aesthetics
are irrelevant in a landscape
daily scorched, reminding us
that in a mountain stripped
to mine for copper
we see our naked selves
and appetites. We value
the finery of hawks,
the horizontal stripes
on canyon walls, and the logs
of petrified time
polished into circles.
A little flare
is all we want in the way
we look. Better to flash
like a tanager
or wear a lizard's diamond
collar than be heir
to the tyranny good taste
imposes. We are more
fantasy than fact
and sweat too much to worry
if our appearances offend,
while against this country
every fashion is transparent
From a collection of David Chorlton's
watercolour and pastel work entitled,
Divided Village, 30x40
Power
By David Chorlton
for R. R., Adobe Mountain
Detention Center
You see, through your window, beyond
the wire fence, a mountain
change colour as drought
takes hold of it. Flickers drill
homes into saguaro, snakes
come from the underground to sun
their cold-blooded skins to life
and brittle shrubs grip with their roots.
You cannot reach the mountain
to climb it and feel
the Earth's weight clinging to your feet
as your rightful share of a world
where power
is to want nothing at all.
From a collection of David Chorlton's
watercolour and pastel work entitled,
Rain, Rain, Rain, 40x30
Cabin Window
By David Chorlton
A two-inch climber scales a lamplit window in high country,
green among the dusty moths
who suction themselves to the glass
with grey patterns spread against the darkness
where the rhythm in the forest
sounds like ankle bells in a pueblo dance
as cicadas stamp all night on the silence
and meteors burn up above the trees.
From a collection of David Chorlton's
watercolour and pastel work entitled,
Full Moon, 22x30
Greenland
By David Chorlton
Five miles above a seamless continent
whose glare absorbs our shadow
before it touches the ground,
we from the world of time
speed over silence
banked against silence
and tinged with the colour of warmth.
Night and day
are white poured
from one bowl into another,
milk into dust
and back again
as summer's frost
crackles with insomnia.
About the poet . . .
David Chorlton was born
in Austria and grew up in the industrial city
of Manchester, England. He moved to Vienna in 1971, happy to leave
the monochrome
atmosphere behind. He worked as a graphic designer and exhibited his
paintings there
before moving to Phoenix in 1978.
The cultural contrasts between Europe and the Southwest
created a tension he has directed into poetry reflecting concerns
from society's hostility
toward the natural world to addressing violence in general. His interests
include medieval music, birds, and seeking out underrated literature
in small press publications. He and his wife, Roberta, live by choice
without a television and are never bored.
Chorlton's publications include poems in magazines across the country,
chapbooks including the winning manuscripts in the 1994 Slipstream
Chapbook Contest & the 1996 Pudding House Chapbook Contest, plus
the collections Forget the Country You Came From (Singular Speech
Press, Connecticut), and Outposts (Taxus Press at Stride, England).
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