The grass is visible again. And the stones. When morning arrives
at the mountaintop, there is the glacier, there are my eyelids.
Carrion bird, clacking beak. Deer leg, vertebrae. My love, I
do not begrudge you that simplicity. Do not avoid the reflection
of the egret in the lake or the sandhill crane. I promise I can gather
it up now, one method by which the past is filigree. Is the ring-billed
gull, is blue smoke pooling in the cave.
This poem first appeared in Old Snow, White Sun (Jackleg Press).
—
Caroline Goodwin moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Sitka, Alaska in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. Her recent books are Old Snow, White Sun (JackLeg Press, Washington, DC), Madrigals (Big Yes Press, Arroyo Grande, CA), and Matanuska (Aquifer Press, Wales, UK). She teaches at California College of the Arts, Stanford Continuing Studies, and UC Berkeley Extension; from 2014-16 she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, where she lives on the coast with Jimi Hendrix the Pug. http://www.carolinegoodw.com/
