The days run past us as if around a breach in a mill dam.
It is early winter; a willow bounces against the current.
All that holds it is rooted in the verge of rock and sand.
Over the years it slips away like the forever children imagine.
Ask the redwings in the swaying limbs, ask the otter,
ask the mink your mother wears as a collar on Sunday.
On trash day, a coyote hunts the suburban streets.
She is the neighborhood conversation piece at half-time
during Chiefs football. While you eat hot wings and franks,
she chews time like a bone. You can count on it.
—
Al Ortolani is a winner of the 2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize and has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. In 2024 he was the recipient of the Bill Hickok Humor Award from I-70 Review. Currently, he’s a contributing poetry editor to the Chiron Review.
