1.
It’s dry everywhere except where it’s flooded. We’re all worn out,
clinging by our fingernails to the cliff, waiting for the fall.
Cataclysm or Catharsis was the concert title once in Klaipeda.
A brilliant pianist whose name was almost Genius.
I have it written down. And still things go on, we feed and drink
and breed and sleep. Kingfisher came in hot and low,
speared something small, sped off. Then it’s back, chipping,
splashes in again, comes up empty I think. What do I know really
is the theme, yet again. I know a few things: the harvest is in,
yields mostly good but prices low. I know many Americans
must soon make up their minds, including many who worry me.
Still, M. shopped today, we have chips and fancy cheese, salmon,
mangos. I’ll go home soon, wake her from her nap. She’ll cook,
I’ll clean up, we’ll settle in, books and screens, a drink. OK, two.
2.
Most leaves fallen, papery, weathered, crunchy.
Three deer in five minutes walking. Waxing moon,
big and watery in the east. Is that true, I keep asking,
a healthy question I think but time-consuming.
It’s chill and windy and I’m still hacking wads
of sputum but it’s good to be out. Not a single tree
seems worried or elated about anything
Americans have done or not done lately.
This may be their mistake, but their sources
provide only limited information. The moon
is even less concerned. We look at her way more
than she looks at us, though she’ll notice
if the lights go off. What do I know. Right?
What I know is not the problem, it’s how
damn little I can do about anything. I barely try anyway.
Write poems. Walk around in the tattered woods.
And then some new photos on the family chat, and
I laugh and text back quickly, and a red-tail
circles over and away to the north and at last
my ridiculous self-pity lifts. Here I am, alone
in the woods, safe and chilly in the late golden sun,
and another white-tail startles and sprints hard
across the plowed field, tail high, as if she thinks
I’m going to chase her with my old legs.
Did she know I will steal her wild, floating image,
carry her ghost home to light so gently on this page,
to leap and leap across its furrows and away?
—
Jeff Gundy’s thirteen books of poetry and nonfiction include, Wind Farm: Landscape with Stories and Towers (Dos Madres, creative nonfiction) and Without a Plea (Bottom Dog, poems). Recent work appears in Georgia Review, The Sun, River Teeth, Kenyon Review, Forklift, Ohio, Christian Century, Cincinnati Review, and Terrain.org. He serves as 2023-25 Writer in (Non)Residence at Bluffton University, and is at work on a project with the working title Phantom Power(s).
