Tracks

By David Lee Fletcher

Tracks is an exploration of poetry from rhyme to reason through thought-provoking metaphors and measured storytelling historical accounts. The book moves from intensely deep honesty to lighthearted humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796030280

David Lee Fletcher

David Lee Fletcher is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. He has been published in The West Wind Review, Buffalo Music Hall Reviews, The Okanogan Natural News and other periodicals. A graduate in English/Creative Writing from So. Or. Univ., he was winner of the Dankook Award (96’) and studied under Oregon Poet Laureate Lawson Inada. He has worked on editorial staffs, as writing project consultant, and been a college writing tutor. He is an accomplished songwriter and musician as well, having played concerts throughout the Northwest. He has performed on NPR and PBS, benefits for libraries, co-ops, and historical societies and recorded on various albums as a studio musician.

Book preview

WILD WOLF WOMAN

The Old Ones tell the story

of Wild Wolf Woman

She lives up there they say

inside the Big Mountain

She breathes fog and blows through holes

She howls and dances

at the edge of fires

lurking

in her painted cheat grass beads

squatting with her matted pine-needle furs.

She stands atop granite rock

and plays a mean fiddle lullabye

pulling her teeth along sinewy strings,

cat-gut strings

rasping a bow of fir across the stars.

Her eyes luminescent

in pools of moonshine

as she drags her shag dress and cloak

across the forest floor

through rippling streams

her heart pounding like a dream

Her ears pierced with

barbed wire

where they tried to keep her

and she wraps us up

with bailing twine in her mystery bed.

Youngs ones suckle her

as she rocks along

in her midnight charade.

She howls wildy calling to us

and if we go and search her out

we become Kachinas,

with snow white moccasins

and torquoise cloaks

and wild wolf heads of our own.

CONFEDERATE GHOST

The Locke graveyard

sleeps upon a hill

and hush

the haunted lullabye

still at night

in quiet dark

a maid goes milking

to a barn that is not there

only stacked fieldstone remains.

She steps lightly

across the swollen waters of spring storms

that have covered

bridge and log and fallen shucked corn

graced on the edge of tilled ground

she wears a white gown

and coffered bonnet

yet bears no face,

only a hallowed darkness where the cheeks have once been

the war now over

and the graves sunken in

where the casket has cracked

and released an old chain

tied to a spirit

a Confederate ghost.

In dusky light

a mist appears

and through the mist a soldier brave

that rides by horseback up the creek

with gun and saber

leathered boot

the smell of wetness old gray nag

that withers where the road does end

and follows trail through shadowed glen

across the skirmished killing field

over split cedar rail again.

A howling moan does echo where

the thick of woods falls open

and by his side

a maid does wail

on bended knee with milking pail

clinging to his coat of stone

her soldier of the holler.

And still he rides

a bannered flag

through wind and rain and prickled thorn

across a legion

through the traipse

and bloodied where the star is torn

he wipes the memory from his brow

and weeps a tear

of sea salt air

where grey and silver show his hair

upon a feathered pillowed stone

Leave ghost alone

lest we should see

in somber wood his company

and hear the crying wounded whore

of soldiers slain

and Civil War.

SEASONED

Seasoned-

  grass lay

stilled by the wind

  moist yet

unafraid

Leaves unyielding

  answer Him-

rythmically sounding chimes

  breathing death at last

Mountain snow

  soothes granite cleft,

falls unbroken

cracking silently

Time loses touch

while outside

Spring brings water soldiers

  riding

in riverbeds unwashed

In