Two Poems by Jocelyn Heath
Aubade for Hidden Places
Kings Canyon, Australia
Dawn, a lover’s searing brush
across sandstone curves,
earth-grooves grow humid
as midsummer swerves
through eucalyptus, born of fire,
swaying its dry dance
while seedpods click
like castanets—
music of sun and shade
and ochre rock,
the tree plays for herself,
the bogong moths, a flock
of honeyeaters shedding
feathers into rainbows
at the canyon’s lip
as we start our slow
hike toward the bottom,
brown to orange to white
sediments pressed
by time’s tight
hand, split back open.
The air cools
at bottom: an Eden
of deep brown pools,
cycads’ squat and ageless
trunks shape a glade
secret as a woman’s body,
vine-veiled,
warm and fragrant
stands of grevillea
and earth and leaves.
I enter the water,
draw breath, push
into opaque depths.
Night Drive to the Mountains
West Virginia
The sudden summit shoots orange light
into fly ash smog, where the tree line breaks
and deer skitter off into thickets,
after miles of watching for their green darting eyes
on bodies mostly seen too late.
Bright smoking spires ahead.
A chain gang of boxcars drags coal
toward the pipe-latticed power plant.
A long lake glows on either side of us,
orange on the water like long-ago flames
gouging a row house out of its block
as I watched from my father’s arms—
as in this water, the flames multiplied
and lit in the lake a second sky where
for a moment, the sunset—hours past—
returned, broadened, until I saw blaze eclipse lake
and fire charge through water and reeds and grass
to level the woods to my house—
poplars cracking and deer thundering
toward us on the shore lines, vine-snarls falling
as fire cages to trap fawns, block us
on a crescent of sand—and in the doubled sky,
wide wings thrashed their body in spirals,
the soundless screams of smoking feathers
before silhouette dissolved into orange night.
Eyes open to the gray smoke that I couldn’t believe
loomed only over that house, fighting my father
as he turned to walk the path back home,
knowing what could follow us there. I never told you
all of this story: just that the chimney
crumbled to ash—the home, a gap and loss.
In this reservoir, the power plant glows on as we pass
back into the lightless new-moon night.
I watch ditches and embankments,
the black tree line just beyond the halo
of high beams, for those flicks of motion
that are all the warning we’ll get.
Jocelyn Heath’s poem “Orbital” won the Student Poetry Award from Crab Orchard Review. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Bellingham Review, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. Other publications include an interview with Natasha Trethewey for Smartish Pace, for which she is an Assistant Editor, and poetry book reviews for Lambda Literary. She received her M.F.A. in poetry in 2011 from the University of Maryland–College Park, and is currently a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University, where she also teaches writing.