Six Poems

Poetry by Jason Ryberg

Coyotes / Crickets / Whippoorwills

 The night is alive

with the three-part harmony

     of coyotes, crickets

     and whippoorwills (with the odd,

     sporadic accomp’niment

     of high-caliber gunfire).

Stars and Crickets

Why don’t you come on out

to my place, baby,

let me give you the guided tour.

Yeah, just take Old 40

five miles or so,

out past the signal-light

and Dewey’s Auto Salvage,

‘round Ms. Johnsons’ Hairpin

and over the Princeton Wall,

through the Snake

and across Lonely Boy Bridge,

Hang a left at the old man

sitting in the broken-down truck

by the side of the road.

go ahead and wave,

that’s why he’s there.

And when you come to the crossing

of Old 97 and Phantom 409, stop the car.

Put an empty long-neck bottle

in the middle of the cross-roads

(the spirits seem to favor Lone Star

or PBR, but any brand will prob’ly do).

Go on and give it a spin

(and be sure to put some hip into it).

Which-ever way it points

is where I’ll be —

waitin’ for you

to come on out

to my place, baby.

You bring the wine

in a brown paper bag

and I’ll bring the whole night sky

on a flat-bed truck

and we’ll drink and howl

and sing shining phrases

in praise of things

near and far —

things that click and chirp

and zoom and glitter,

right under our noses

or a zillion miles away,

it’s all the same out here.

I may not have no fancy car or a hundred

Brooks Brothers suits or even

a single pair of Italian leather shoes,

but, I got an ocean

of whispering wheat,

time-releasing all its secrets

in strange and mysterious frequencies,

I got long-gone-lonesome train-songs

always comin’ in from somewhere across the way,

and,

I got galaxies

of stars and crickets, baby,

stars and crickets.

Somehow

I got it in my

head that, somehow, these sprawling

black railroad tracks had

     become an affront to the

sky and therefore we’ve had our

          third straight day of non-stop snow.

What’s Happening?

It’s just another

poem about another

Kansas sunset, set

in middle-to-late

August – yellow / gold to red /

orange, then purple

to Oxford Grey - this

one featuring the fairly

standard issue, small

fishing pond in the

foreground, slowly going from

moss green to almost

a tarpit black, its

glassy surface reflecting

a newly arrived

moon who has just now

decided to drop in and

see what’s happening.

Greetings from South Central Missouri (Tanka)

Flashlights in the trees,

meth-deals in the cemetery,

bullet holes in the

mailbox, and a three-legged

     hound-dog napping in the sun.

The Shade of Blue That the Sky Wishes it Could Be

 A thin fog has formed

this morning from steam rising

up from frozen fields

and yards, and now a

freight train whose cars are mostly

covered-over with

spray-painted cartoon

characters, gang-signs, hobo-

code and what I’d think

a roomful of art

school professors would have to

concede was some form

of post-post-modern

abstract expressionism,

comes rudely slamming

and blaring by. And

then a bird the shade of blue

that the sky wishes

it could be, plops down

on a fence post for a few

seconds, then, is gone.

BIO: Jason Ryberg lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.