Tim Pilgrim

Stick horses

We rode together on wooden molding
dad had not nailed to the dining room wall --

spirited knotty-pine appaloosas --
eight-year-old team of do-gooders

snaking through trails of flowerbed,
garden, lawn. Leather shoelaces

as reins, toy pistols strapped on,
red bandanas around necks,

we never got bucked off
on patrol of weed-covered lots,

bandits caught in thicket, jailed
in shed just before we were sent

to bed. I cried all night when my pony
became baseboard in the den.

(previously published in Cirque)



300 streams of memory

I dream about time
and the distance between us,

how age settles like silt
in a Montana stream,

replay wounds of cutthroat
laid side by side for gutting,

out of the wicker creel,
where they gasped in unison,

each hoping to see water again,
feel comforting coolness,

dart down to a pool, deep,
lie healing, until time to feed.

(previously published in Cirque)



Deserted advice

Believe me, now is the best time
to hope. Forget your loneliness. Suspend
all gathering doubt, bind your wounds,

embrace change in its run to shore.
At dusk, gaze into a tidepool.
Find the resolve to search for purple.

Give yourself your word. Kindle seaweed
on the beach at midnight. Without warning,
send this note in a bottle to your lover.

(previously published in Kumquat Poetry Challenge)



Timothy Pilgrim, associate professor emeritus of Western Washington University in Bellingham and a Pacific Northwest poet with a couple hundred acceptances by dozens of journals (such as Seattle Review, Windfall, Cirque and Thick With Conviction), is co-author of Bellingham poems (2014) and included in Idaho's Poets: A Centennial Anthology (University of Idaho Press), Tribute to Orpheus II (Kearney Street Books), and Weathered pages: The Poetry Pole (Blue Begonia Press).

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