Your wing, your fluke, your katabatic breaths blow back our hoods and eddy cool calls through hotel doors. Parched, we swallow and bump down arctic wind to debark in your mountain-crowned city where people tell us you are The Great Land but even we already know. We drop below your white veil and there you are all wide silver rivers and glacial milks and ready sea. You dust the living and the still living. Trade secret dropped on the breeding ground, Open the ion channel to spontaneous fire, molecular Lying low among the municipal flowerbed’sĪltering tail lengths in the tadpole stage, Or do you live among them, marry their daughters? Guided by the sounds of those unceasing calls Outstretched wings arriving - these two late comers – squawking loudly – Then like an apparition appearing from out of the heavens – Responding to their tribe leader’s trembling Inside this landing party’s circling, constantly In every language for every living creature, Much the way a cat’s cry mimics an infant’s.Īs if there is a universal cry of distress Their graceful black necks attentively raised Relations of the Anatidae family of swans One goose to each of the others in the flock -Ī loud honk and honk response / honk and honk responseĪs I stood muddled by this mystical ritual. In their nasal-tonal tribal Anserini language Yet today while walking, a close-knit flock Like fading fossils left imprints on my mind Of black beaks tugging at clumps of grass, often they’dĭrink appreciatively from a reforming puddle. Intermittently stop to rest from long migratoryįlights, whereby reverently bowing the reach I watched different flocks of Canada geese Published in CLMP, "Reflections," 2013 and in the author’s book, Selenity Book Four (February 2017) Or the fading lights that might be anything very largeĪll alone, save for ourselves and all else. The passage of that distant ore freighter Into the chronometer of beam timing the waves Selene’s torch searching out into the night With the weightless grace of a birch-bark canoe That lie as layers of Earth’s calloused skinĮach layer sometime exposed to the aloneness Patient while it practices to become in turn Through year, decade, century, crush of water, You’re right about light houses, of course. Previously appeared in the author’s collection Totem Beasts (Big Table, 2017) To cover the shopping cart, the bike, the cabinet The egrets pruned and waited for the tide (they all know) when you’re just too close. Would be a height of twelve feet or more.Īs he fluttered, fumbled, up, up. If we empty our minds can we acquire that abilityīeing alone in these woods or in ancient fertile fields Some say that dogs pause to stare at things we are unable see In the lithe spirit and light of a late fall blue moon Is it hubris to somehow think I can sense their presence I pause to listen for sounds and whispersįor the faint echoes of stoic stone age hunters, gatherers, and herders On roots, runners and dead branches covered by the fall In these deep dark bottoms and wind worn bluffsĮven now walking amongst these ancient trees Padding softly, slowly, deliberately listeningĪlways glancing furtively back every few steps Tall, with long flowing black hair, covered in deer skin Cool fall wind ripples through hilly bean fieldĬan just see bloody tip of the pointer’s tailĪs it buggy whips chasing a frantic spinning rabbitīy modern evolution of mccormick’s harvester
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