to her from the whitewater
and another time the owl in daylight
who flew past her window more than once,
the bear who loped through her camp
when her dad died, the cloudless sky
over her mother’s burial plot
where two vapor trails suddenly crisscrossed.
She would not let me go without
another word, another anecdote.
Nothing escaped her hunt for meaning, meaning.
And the kestrel swooped from the treetop,
struck the moth, and looked me in the eye.
Expected
That sense on a fall night driving home
that I will see something and must see something,
climbing the hill toward the reservoir.
I will see the shadowy buck grazing in a hollow of lawn
and his antlers emerging like a doused candelabra,
and stop the car to peer beyond the street lights
with my headlights off as he watches me and decides
to dip his face back to the dark grass.
That sense of readiness prepared
by so many unexpected things.
The man lunging onto our car in the Metro,
the doors hushing shut, the gendarmes slapping their hands
on the windows as we pulled away.
He glared at the one couple who dared to look at him
and excused himself with a barked curse.
That sense recorded in the lifted arms and curved fingers
of the Highland dancers to honor the deer’s grace
as he eludes the hunter.
That sense derived from my mother
who saw an angel by her bedside as a child
and knew the ghosts who attended her
as she cleaned house were playful but indifferent.
Seeing her during her difficult recovery
naked in her diaper and helping her dress
and washing her hair, that sense that I would find
the dimple in her scalp where the prosthesis was inserted.
It gathers in the strange and makes it yours.
Spell for Encanto Creek
Tall blades of tufted grasses, keep on flowing.
Towhees like good ideas, keep on flowing.
Pooled water, black in shadow, green in sunshine,
with wild olives bending down to drink,
those figures coming daily to the bridge
to look at their two shadows on your surface,
keep them returning, keep them coming back.
Outward Bound
As when, on the interstate in the country,
you have to pull over and stop
and get out to change drivers, the hurtling forward
stops and the day opens as the car door opens,
and you are no longer moving but still, as the day moves around you,
and you see just how fast everyone else is going,
and you decide either to enjoy the field beside you, your back to the traffic,
or quickly as possible get the car going again:
So, leaving the rush of private thoughts is also
like entering an open stillness. A great halt occurs.
Someone else, talking, removes you from the inner pressure,
and either you can enjoy the release, like a field of sunflowers,
or hurry to break off
and rejoin the mental traveling that speeds you away.
The Heronry
After a year of too much face time,
I came where I could choose, instead of people,
birds and their slant gaze, water, trees and clouds,
the gossip and confidences of cat’s-paw breezes
across the face of a lagoon.
I knew the place was the byproduct of money.
I knew it was peace that the state had paid for—
though only a few who knew about it prospered.
There was a bench in the sun that looked out over the shallows,
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