Monarch

It is all so nice, so me:

The needle on vinyl sound of tires

on pavement,

A radio perfect voice explaining a piece

by Schubert,

plowed earth the color of McDonald’s

coffee, one cream / one sugar.

All of it to recompense this road

I’d rather not take,

To make a cloister of my car

against the cotton fields:

white and ripe with unfamiliarity.

Until I kill her,

the dead monarch butterfly

Stuck in my windshield wiper

Wings still flapping with the wind.

Once, my child’s hand held

A newly emerged monarch.

Careful not to touch the soft,

Wet wings. Waiting, imagining

she stayed by choice.

I drive. Knowing

she stays by necessity.

Ready to be home again. Anxious

to remove her body.

Dust to Dust

(After Wendell Berry)

Whose life is worth leaving

potatoes to dissolve back to soil

or keeping half eaten Seckel pears

from the arms of our children

eager for the snowballs of winter?

Why leave the earth’s breast engorged

for a nipple of latex or silicone?

I have seen the brimming white fields

and I have seen us feed the gulping

mouths of machines and the milk

as it runs down their faces

and into the streets to turn black

under rubber wheels.

“From dust

to dust,”

- it was a blessing.

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The Peace of Wild Things

By WENDELL BERRY

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Breath

Before her first cry

I stand at the kitchen window,

eyes half open,

waiting for hot water.

I breath through the glass.

Like a man with pneumonia

I breath through

the morning-eyed glass

and smell the sun’s breath

as he clears his voice

through the clouds.

Mushrooms

I would resort

to that infamous

poet’s crutch and write

a poem about a poem

but I am sure

you would not be interested

in that, dear reader.

Instead:

the mushrooms

growing in my neighbor’s

meticulous yard among

her vine-wrapped archways

and non-seasonal,

non-indigenous flowers

and how

they are so much like poems –

little reminders that cultivation

is not everything,

and that, with enough

soggy gray days

and a fair amount of fecal material

life can spring up

just about anywhere.

Then again, that may just be

the mushrooms.