Soft Ground

Though I tell no one, I can hardly bear to leave the garden 

even for one week. Perhaps that shows something lacking in me—

a fenced emotional life, an imagination hard as clay.  The entire ride

to the airport, my chest tightens. Astonishing, how a person can be

changed entirely by the scent of sage and coyote mint, 

by the quick tongues of painted ladies that swarm the sea daisies, by hours 

of zigzagging bees, their back legs swinging. Am I a hermit now 

in sun hat and rubber clogs, tracking rainfall and scribbling random observations? 

But no—I am off! I am in the sky over the Pacific! Landless as an albatross. 

Off, to bore indulgent hosts with my enthusiasm for rock swales and the migration 

pattern of monarchs. For the bee at night, asleep inside the orange room 

of a closed poppy. The swift sting of the solitary mud dauber, so docile usually,

until I kneel atop it’s burrow. Yes—I will bore you with enthusiasm

for the strange pleasure of tossing a dead mouse where the hawks and herons

can spy it. How in mere minutes, it disappears. I will be 

inexplicable, in the manner of a foreigner. Most everywhere 

is like that, now I have finally found a home. Seeds of blue-eyed grass 

fall from their stalks into my palm. Weightless. 

Published in Poet Lore, Vol. 119 (Summer/Fall 2024)