Late Night Desert Walk, March 2020
I can’t imagine crossing this. In the black sky, I can name four constellations: the dippers, Orion . . . Okay, three. Appalling, really, how little I know. I can’t even figure out how to spend a slow afternoon, walk a rough gully between should and want. Not everyone has this voice in their head. Stick with what you know for sure. The shape of agave, saguaro, brittlebush. The Catalinas severe in this odd light. Tonight, the flat edge of the half-moon looks torn by a careless hand. Will we turn back now? Will we build a small fire?
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Picture Window
It is this evening I want to remember: my skinny husband reclining, wearing the wool socks he wears year round. We are eating sandwiches and watching NewsHour. The din of the day’s evils runs through us, begins to blur like bird smear on the window. I lean into the mercy of this room, this ordinary. My friend two doors north texts that she has an oriole at the hummingbird feeder. I take such pleasure in this fact. In the weight of it somehow, and in the lightness too.
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Gail Martin’s book, Begin Empty-Handed, won the Perugia Press Poetry prize in 2013 and was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award for Poetry in 2014. The Hourglass Heart (New Issues Prose and Poetry) was published in 2003. She works as a psychotherapist in Kalamazoo, MI. Recent work can be seen on Blackbird, Juxtaprose, and Willow Springs. Her third collection, Disappearing Queen, will be published by Two Sylvias Press in 2021. Online at: http://www.gailmartinpoetry.com/