AFTER READING MARY OLIVER, I GO TO THE POND
This trail is my brother
who I have seen
naked and
shaking in the rain
Moon-blue and holding
Too many things in his hands
We fold in half
Submitting to laughter
And listen to everything crash
SO THEN THE BIRDS (2024)
After the marathon
I return to the path where
I spent every salt-slick Saturday
on sun-scorched legs
numbly aware of how there’s
nothing here for me to do.
I think: When am I done running? When am I
done? When I’m pregnant? When my
knees give out? When I have the perfect
stomach or the perfect soul?
When I can’t find the room
to love it anymore?
And a red hot sun drapes, cat-languid,
over the pads of the English ivy, so rich
that you can barely glimpse bark, so rich
that I notice the passage of time.
And here, here is the sycamore which lodges
the double-crested cormorants. Today two of them:
winding their necks like a kinked fire hose to peer
over the canal, dotted with boats
delivering now a faraway pulse
of music stripped just to base, so low
that a soft gust of wind overtakes it, so low
beneath the crash of my shoes.
And new graffiti! Since the last run,
The backdrop for a sunlit cardinal
preserved in summer’s amber.
Now a twelve-year-old on a bike — “good
evening, miss,” like a foreign language textbook.
I think, “Is it good?” until the audacity
desiccates to vapor.
Actually, I don’t have anything else to do
in my whole big life
except to be here.
That’s when I’ll be done running,
When all the birds are dead.
Rare bird not pictured
THE RARE BIRD (2023)
The rare bird does not know he is rare
When I stand open-mouthed in the wood
He knows only the fight.
. . . . . . . . I'll remind
you of this when you ask why we're friends.
(I have searched for you all of my life.)
I swear I will play on this blessed earth until I die. — Miracle Fish
I would not consider myself a poet, but it has been a defining experience of life in DC to be here while Ada Limón was Poet Laureate. It is one of this city's many gifts that I was able to hear her speak a few times at the Library of Congress. During her two years in the role, she focused a lot on environmental activism and elevated other voices who wrote about the everyday magic of the natural world.
I think for a long time I only wrote poetry about being in love. And I still do, I guess, if you consider the great love of my life to be the C&O Canal Towpath, which you very well might. This is the trail where I train for all of my marathons, the trail from which most of these pictures were taken, and the trail whose creatures are tattooed on my upper arm (visibly) and my soul (more visibly).
In her last address before giving up the title, Ada Limón prefaced her discomfort with prose by saying "It’s not that I don’t want to write full sentences. It’s that I trust the mystery more." I do not relate to this, but I still find it beautiful. So thank you to any readers who support my mystery.
And if you hate it, I also write about computational determinism and girlhood, real and imagined.