Iain Haley Pollock

[WEATHER OF SUMMER AND WEEKEND BLUR]

Weather of summer and weekend blur
in my three-year California boyhood.

The park at Malibu Creek that afternoon
could have been July or Saturday.
Dad
marched us to a stagnant pool, film setting
of forgettable Tarzan sequels, the great White
colonial fantasy splashing with his monkey
or Jane.
The news around that time reported
cougar-mauled hikers in the coastal hills
California calls mountains.
Trooping back
from the pool, I asked if I was safe.
From cougars.
Lurking and camouflaged in the high, dry grass.

Of course I was.
In the picnic ground, we unpacked
lunch (peanut butter and forgettable).
As we ate,
the hills above us were quiet, high and dry dead.

Then, a riot of fire trucks headed upslope,
wailing amplified among the inclines.
When their siren-
whine had passed, the yip-howl of coyotes.
Staccato.
Every ridge anxious with it.
Rising and falling
with it.
The dead (high, dry) hills yip-howl alive.
Rise and fall. Lurking.
Alive.
Me, safe?
Of course?

A long stick-pin pushed through the sphinx moth
of that moment,
affixed a day otherwise forgettable
into the vitrine of specimens
I could not uncollect.

Malibu Creek, July or Saturday.
Tarzan and (lurking)

cougars in the grass (high, dry).
And the dead hills
alive with rise and fall.
Staccato.
Anxious.
Then always now: (lurking) above me
(coyote, coyote, coyote) the hills yip-howl alive.

IAIN HALEY POLLOCK is the author of two poetry collections, Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James, 2018) and Spit Back a Boy (Georgia, 2011). His work has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and an NAACP Image Award nomination. He directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College.