Jeff Streeby

El Paso: July

Mike is trying to lift up the horse’s head and I’m on one knee trying to get at the big vein in the neck. The sorrel’s eyes are closed: a week of this and he’s almost used up—washy and shaky and about to go down. But before I can open the stop on the jug of Ringer’s, he squeals and bawls and is up on his hind legs, backing away. He’s like that for what seems a long time before everything stops and he falls over backwards. When he hits the ground, a cloud of red dust rises and his last breath leaves him all at once—a loud choked-off grunt.

Shadows are falling. The sky at this hour is layered in reds—all the shades of chestnut horses.  The dust is settling. The morning glories climbing the barn are closing up. Soon the coyotes will be out, the burrowing owls. Nighthawks will be calling.

Mike holds the broken lead shank. I wince at my bloody wounds—shoulder, hip, and head. The dead horse’s hide is wet with sweat. We don’t move. We don’t say a thing.

West Texas sunset--

in the seam of earth and sky,

this hot, still moment.

Maybe we knew all along that he would die, but we were young and did not expect life to surrender with such violent reluctance, did not expect the husk of it lying there in the yard to be so different, so absolutely empty.

CP

Jeff Streeby is an old cowboy who earned his MFA in Poetry from Gerald Stern’s program at New England College in New Hampshire. His poem “Biography” won the 2013 Provincetown OuterMost Community Radio Poetry Award. He is a Senior Lecturer in English and History at Assumption University in Bangkok, Thailand.

Jeff Streeby

Target Ship

It’s 1921 and Kaiser Bill’s coastal raider UB88, her harmless iron breached by Bull Halsey’s well-trained gun crews on the Wickes, slides away bow-first, crash-diving into her infinite future. Six miles off Long Beach, she sits upright on the bottom, her dark compartments filling with sand.  All around her, like little stars burning in cold currents of space, hunting lamps of moon-eyed fish light her way.

Every hour, ships put to sea. Every hour, ships arrive somewhere. Day in and day out, green waves break on every shore. Every coastal wind bends its saltgrass. Gannets hover, pitch up, veer sharply away. From our point of view, all these things are indisputable.

You get it, don’t you?

Even before she leaves the slips, UB88 is forever fixed as we are in the present. She cannot be erased. In the depths, cold currents wash the wreck. Coral finds anchorage there and builds, shell on shell, dumbly upward. Scorpion fish and rock cod haunt the deck. Like we will, she herself will resolve in time to rude materials, but though her mass disperse, each forgotten effect her presence has achieved even upon the sediments under her keel will be real.

Nothing is lost.

Every night the same stars mark the mysterious currents of the universe. The same sea roars in the dark heart of any empty conch. Whether it means anything or not, every hour another sail fills with its irresistible wind.

Cool evening—

In the temple pond,
koi rise
to touch a summer moon.

CP

Jeff Streeby grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where he attended Morningside College. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Gerald Stern’s program at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire.  He is a horseman, cowboy poet and performer whose work has appeared in Verdad, Southwest American Literature, Los Angeles Review, and others.