* Instructions: How Not to Walk Like a Duck My mother gave me strict instructions not to walk like a duck. I never questioned this obsession to instruct my feet not to turn out as I walk. Like most children I never understood what parents try to teach us out of their love and old miseries that held the key to their own tangle of hurt and fortresses against fear. So, I went along concentrated on where my feet landed and how as I walked with the rest of my family into the jaws of Sunday’s Lutheran lessons in boredom and music I wondered if everyone was laughing or shaking their heads in pity because, walking up the aisle, my flat feet fell too far to each side. * Comment On How Not to Walk Like a Duck At play we never thought of such things and now on this beach I search for other footprints that match mine. There’s a big storm off the coast churning up kelp and jellyfish those stinging nettles of the swelling sea. The ruddy turnstones do not mind they wait for tiny crabs to rise and me? I lie here well aware the tides take any footprints that remain duck-footed or not. We are all naked, flat- footed or not. So, what is the lesson in those instructions to walk straight un-hobbled by any lack of arches? My mother might’ve told you, might have told me but she died just after I kissed her and there are songs in the wild waves she and the rest of the dead cannot sing *
*
Nature Poem
The big clouds split,
break and skid
across the sky all morning.
Trees across the lake
are silver in the gusts.
There are shadows of rain
pulled through the sun.
Bee in yellow flower, sweet
feral smell of jewelweed,
hummingbird: how warm
is the sun when it is here?
I have tried to read the ways
the weather changes
all day.
*
Yesterday
we went our separate ways
for a while, walked different paths,
lost each other
and were scared. It was dark
and cold soon enough:
pictured various disasters in the woods, cried,
and finally found each other again.
*
It is a tale among the tales
that must be told around the fire
at the end of the day:
A bear that did not move away.
Coyote that crossed the path and
vanished.
Many stumps in the chapel of birch,
west light sinking lower, waves
that boom against cliffs.
*
Another day
we have each other
in the intermittent heat
under rockets of light
and the fast clouds.
Downplay gratitude.
Keep a close eye on one another,
sleep some, safe in the sun, vow
never to lose one another
in the woods like that
again. Kingfisher rattles
in the white pine.
A tern falls and pulls up a perch.
*
* Every Day is an Anniversary We who are unaccustomed to the death of children mistake our terror in the face of it for grief or the horror that young lives can be removed, erased as easily as the formula for a missile from the white boards of the physics classes where they disconnect their studies of the teeth of death from the digitalized models of how a little skull and its little body can absorb a rain of phosphorous or depleted uranium while playing in the jagged shell of the village. At first our own children running in the gardens with the first explosion of peonies and roses do not appear susceptible to such ravages, so bright with their piping voices of newness and awe. Divorced from the reality that we have elected fathers and mothers to do the dirty work of mowing down darker children in drier places laughing in the unfamiliar music of languages alien to ours we shun them or at least are encouraged to be deaf to their last little sighs. This is not exactly turning away is it? Our own parents and theirs, survivors of a turning screw of lynchings and Hoovervilles, brought into the fold by sincere admonitions that they must sacrifice their children in the fight to the finish against someone else's children, were never well-versed in the humanness of the others’ young. Loss is learned I think, and grief? To witness any young bodies brutalized and admit to their innocence requires an IQ in the widest arena of love away from which we’ve been carefully weaned. There must be war, we were told and with war comes the death of someone else's boy or girl. Too smashed even to cover with flowers. *
* On a High Bank Above the River Sun drunk I fall back into the sling and let my winter go again and during this midday sleep the last of my war dreams booms and diminishes until all the diseased trees offer up offerings for warblers and wildflowers, light for mottled beds of trout lily, lacy squirrel corn and yellow violets. Drunk with sun my waking is as fine as the torpor after cumming and I do not wish to stand or move in any day-to-day drudgery. I’ll stay in this country of the tallest cranes that shout out; the bright little redstarts that flicker high enough in the dead thickets to sing. *