The Zingara Project

Tag: Dressed for Winter

  • What Is Lost Is Not Lost by Pete Mladinic

    I like looking at bicycles in old films
    such as this one of Dawson, a mining town,
    now a ghost town.  I like at the opening
    the long line of coke ovens, the miners, two
    men, walking home from the mine.  I like
    the bicycles, the dogs, the women’s dresses,
    their hairstyles, looking into their faces
    wondering what happened
    after Dawson, where they went, what they
    did or did not do, what they did or did not say.
    The lady narrator, her
    last name Loy, said she and her
    husband went to graduate school the following year. 
    They had two young sons, Merrill, the elder
    and Bill, who lives now in Eugene,
    Oregon, and introduces his mother
    in the film, which was shot by Mr.
    Loy in 1938.  There are numerous shots
    of the boys, several of Bill in his playpen
    and then one where he seems
    happy, having just
    learned to walk.  There are shots
    of the mines, the houses that sprang from
    mountainsides, the church, the school.
    Now, nothing left in Dawson
    but the cemetery.  I like the moments of Bill
    walking on his own,
    but I have no idea what he does in Eugene.
    He must almost be seventy.
    His mother, a young wife
    in the film, sticks her tongue out in
    one shot.  She was born in 1917.

    Peter Mladinic has published three books of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington, all with the Lea County Museum Press. He lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.

  • His Agenda by Peter Mladinic

    to place a lens before a leaf in the sun
    and evoke a flame
    to see a magnificent cottonwood green in the pale high desert
    to see a hawk on a wooden post
    to walk at night a runway where in daylight planes land
    to gather mesquite and lay it near a fire pit
    to strip naked on a canyon rim and swim in the creek
    and towel himself dry and put on clean clothes
    to put ice and whiskey in a glass
    to sit in a chair and open a paperback, Agee’s
    Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
    to fly in a piper cub over a canyon
    to see the green cottonwood alone in a corner of pale high desert
    to know the cactus wren is cousin to the javelina
    and the sun’s dying fire and wind
    and egrets white on the Pecos
    below fire-blackened trees.

    Peter Mladinic has published three books of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington, all with the Lea County Museum Press.  He lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.

  • Purple Vest by Peter Mladinic

    I had a job interview with a man with a purple vest
    in a city of lakes
    a city where in winter
    the temperature drops to twenty below
    a man who could afford a down jacket
    a garage
    a man with a moustache
    and whose surname of three syllables
    is similar to mine
    he wore a purple vest
    and a tie that at the time
    impressed me
    I described it in a sentence
    in a notebook I lost
    while moving from one part of the country
    to another, a smaller city
    on whose outskirts kudzu
    had engulfed tall trees
    I left my down jacket
    in the city
    where I’d sat across from Mr. M
    in his purple vest
    who asked about my employment record
    giving me papers with blank spaces
    and a pen to fill those spaces
    with details about what I’d done
    and might do

    —

    Peter Mladinic has published three books of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington, all with the Lea County Museum Press.  He lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.