Katharine Coles

I might have married a painter, Therefore his mother. A radar Detector, a snow-covered Mountain, a novel By John Grisham not even Out yet. No, I wed The cop directing my rush, Toot toot, a trainer to test Agility, a kettle calling Time to steep. Yes, But I married this bird you must Close your eyes to know At scale, to hear his trills And fancy arpeggios Come-come-hithering. His note of warning.

Full of light and music, the beating air. Light like a bird, Calvino says, not a feather. Over the water the shags come in to land All wings, uh-ohing over the cliffs. Rock, their nests, and bare the rookeries. Blue eye, blue eye, the wind plays fast and sharp. They lift and ride and do not pick their fights. Oh, blue sky, blue day. Heart Of muscle, thrumming down, and swift.

We keep trying to kill it, split it, hack It to itsy bits. We suspend it On the wall where we can see it Passing. We hang it around our necks Or wrists, laying pulse next to Pulse as if each might like Company. Ba-bump, etc. Rising And setting has everything to do With it. In the afternoon we feel so Lazy we try not to close our eyes And jerk awake, wondering what has Passed, and where did we go For that suspended hour, And could anything keep us here.

Hildegard believed A woman’s brain drew Heat to itself, drew seed From a man all the way up The spine’s long stair The stake bracing the spine Licking all the way orange, Red, blue — shut it — And why not? My brain has been Hungry all this time.

How much of everything is pure Getting ready. Dressing, pushing the button Asquint through its machined furl Only to unbutton, the eyes-open moment Revealed. Ask any animal: nudity isn’t The same as nakedness. Once you’ve seen A dangling, you can’t unsee it, and From that anything might ensue. There’s the rub. Taking the long view You could say the future is romantic I suppose. Also something you Could never do without, though its bric- a-brac is purely theoretical, until It’s arranged. Or not. Then, a miracle?

You are smaller than I remember And so is the house, set downhill Afloat in a sea of scrub oak. From up here It’s an ordinary box with gravel Spread over its lid, weighting it, but Inside it’s full of shadows and sky. Clouds pull themselves over dry Grass, which, if  I’m not mistaken, will erupt Any minute in flame. Only A spark, a sunbeam focused. From up Here, enjoying the view, I can finally Take you in. Will you wave back? I keep Slingshotting around. There’s gravity For you, but all I ever wanted was to fly.

Blizzard to lilac. Dandelion to leaf. Endless variation of seasons I note in passing, smells I cannot smell: rotting gardens, feces, musk of cat. These two run in front of me, golden shoulder to patchwork, heads lifted or lowered into scent, tongues lolling. Ears damp with their own spittle and each other's tell me, tethered a pace behind, their journey's epic: tipping forward to the familiar or stranger's distant yap; angling to my breathing, whispered praise, my slightest suggestion. Ignored. The shepherd throws herself into any whirring wheel, to herd the neighbor's tractor mower or the UPS truck's packets home; pulling her back, the golden's oblivious ballast, instinct heading always for the gutter's deepest puddle, her own way within the forked leash's one-foot range. As we pass, the clans set up their barking, as if we were news, gathering center of a congenial warning din—mine answer with disturbances of pace, an extra pull or lollop, grins thrown slant-eyed over shoulders until one hears a call she can't ignore, surrenders to baying's ferocious joy moving through muscle and bone. Moving storm, storm's eye: happy universes whirl in their skins as I do in mine. Unknowable, their fate. Mediums between foreign principalities, they're tied to me, to each other, by my will, by love; to that other realm by song, and tooth, and blood.