Two Poems By Scott Darrington

Dry rocks
  
The riverbed is packed with tight, white water, 
folded over the gray rocks; like the ducks
that slip on frozen ponds, the snow has come
to try a summer life in solid winter.
  
Like that warm March morning I led you up
a different riverbed where I’d seen a snake
looped stiff around the rocks. We watched it basking,
absorbing sunlight in the still-chilled air.
I poked it from three feet back and it slowly
  
jerked back, eventually remembering to 
react. Even its tail tip castanets 
clacked slow. It took a few more pokes before
it thawed and flowed down the bed, disappearing
into the thirsty rocks. And now you too
  
have limply slipped within the earth. Come, time.
I’ve grown tired of pretending to be
warm here. Bring spring and melt these milky bones.
Let me, too, pass into the ice-packed crust. 

Trials of modernity
  
It’s gross how impolite some trees can be,
which choose to ossify their butts instead
of withering when axes chop their tops.
They hang around like thirsty Maya hydras,
headless serpents feathered with a mass of grass
that sways too close to the bark stone to be mown.
The American-grafted Hercules must seize 
his wedge-headed club and carve around the bound
beast to hack off its other heads, which spread
beneath his bluegrass and azaleas,
then chain the rigid arbor necks and flex
the legs of Augeas’ entire herd
under his Chevy’s hood to tear out the
ringed relic, then treat the grave of Gaia
as a proper hole: fill it level, shake
out new seed, watch the perfect lawn awake. 

Scott Darrington is a small-town Nevada deserter currently living in Utah who writes mostly about the little things that happen in life, the small comforts and frustrations (especially those of humanity and nature pushing on each other) that pile together to make life what it is. He hopes that his writing can help people to appreciate the things that make up everyday life. He writes mostly in blank verse or small, cobbled-together constructions. He has been published by BYU’s Americana and Leading Edge magazines, Utah Life Magazine, the Utah Horror Writers Association, and the lovely Provo Poemball machines.