Notes On Gravel
Perhaps you are living without your partner for the first time in many decades, feeling the presence of an absence.
Are you afraid?
The ear of corn knows whereof it is plucked.
Maybe you are in the full throes of grief over the death of a parent. Inevitable and unbearable.
Are you afraid?
The wind moves this way and that way, something is pushing it.
Maybe you are that too-perceptive youth, a newcomer where you live but one who sees the surroundings better than any native. Like Cassandra, the truth you speak will go unheard, and so you see your future bound up with that struggle too.
Are you afraid?
Somewhere a thousand swans are flying through the winter’s worst storm.
Or you want to go home again, as you have been intending for thirty years: career in one part of the world, return to ancestral ground after. But climate change has upended that lifelong plan, the trees and hills where you were born a fire zone today.
They are white and shining, their black beaks
open a little, the…
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