2026-07-01
Resolution
I have tried my best
to love the world
as any good citizen
would. Not all of it,
of course—I’m not
that big of a fool—but
the next time a bat
swoops beneath the sky
of our living room, I’ll try
to appreciate how it navigates
its fear into a fierce geometry
while I search for the butterfly
net, ready to gently capture the frantic
flight, to let it relocate into the
friendlier dark of our yard and that
framework of wide trees. And the bat
really is the poet’s creature, able to see
beyond its eyes and trusting its wings.
Yet how do I love the bullies these days?
I can do all right when the wind flips
my cap down some long street, but
what about the hidden faces
who seem everywhere, asking
Where do you come from?
as if anyone could answer that.
I’d like to toss that same question
back at them, watch them
stumble for a response, looking
for papers that genuinely
identify those headwaters.
If I think about this too much
I return to the wind, which today
adds texture to an already chilly air.
But sometimes it’s a friend. When
I was a kid, my kite found its proper way
because the wind said sure. That’s
not exactly compassion, but balance
is essential to breathing. And I know
where the wind comes from. The petfood factory
is west, the cattle farm the rare southeaster,
snow and blossom pure north.
The wind carries its own name, wears
no mask, no disguise,
and certain days when clouds
don’t leave the sky
entirely alone, the wind
has a face.
If the Gods Are Napping
An old friend of mine made a journey
to Australia, the genuine other side
of what most of us know, to hear
his favorite poet read for an hour.
The afternoon of the reading, the poet
cancelled, cancelled the ringing of
the poems, of the miles and the very
days themselves. But
my friend said that was okay,
that the gesture was what mattered.
I made my own trip, a whole hour
of driving, to hear, at last,
my favorite singer. She and her voice
were not so young anymore, and notes
which had been easy, were a long walk
on ground that kept giving way.
And yet, if she simply pointed her voice
in the direction she wanted it to go,
the moment seemed complete enough,
memory and microphone a good mix.
She also still looked hot in cowgirl boots.
John Muir memorized virtually
all of the Bible, but he didn’t understand
the language until he climbed
a Douglas Spruce in the Sierras
and rode out a storm,
listened to the wind and swayed
with the needles and limbs of the trees
and heard all the words for the first time.
I’m only riding my dreams but I’m able then
to worship at the altar of a woman I learned
to love. She’s disappeared otherwise
but I continue to try to articulate
a prayer or something like that
in weather still fierce and full
and defiantly musical.
I often drive gravel roads to get
wherever I might be going. I appreciate
the dust collecting on my car.
On one of these drives, I passed a cornfield
and thought I saw a scarecrow, my first
other than in the movies, the cartoons, the scary
stories where the straw comes alive to eat
small children and stray dogs. In my younger,
genuinely poetic days, I might have turned it
into God, been wonderfully elaborate about
where the sacred comes from. But the scarecrow
turned out to be a stump, a fine one to be sure,
the stuff of museums, yet something the farmer
could have easily sent off to steam. He didn’t, though,
maybe his nod to nature’s presence in
the whatever we’re making. Wild breaths, after all,
extend from every living thing, the poet in me
used to say, used to even try to sing.