USA

KALynch@aol.com

HUMAN TERMS

The albino calf stands
in the pasture, shining.

Autumn. Last spring's
birds are back.

They must be exhausted.
Isn't this the luck

of life - to see the one
thing, then the other?

It's all right to fall in love
with the idea of that gleaming

freak with its pink-
rimmed eyes, its near-

blindness. So young. Nearly
spirit I might say. Other-

worldly. But don't let me
turn a white calf into myth.

The creature shoulders
into the dappled herd.

Something nameless pushes
the strange one forward,

pulls the birds
back to us, to nothing

to do with us. We can't help
wanting to be the story.

I stole figs today
while watching cows.

They loosened
into my hand easily

and opened, as if they had
been waiting for me.


Published in Spoon River Poetry Review
(Winner of Editor's Prize 2000)

STILL AWAKE

The sorrow of thought is that it replaces
the world that stunned us into thought…
-William Matthews-

Sunrise. California quail
chip and scuff seed scrabble
while dawn nudges green
into the grasses. Oh it's a murky
lovely thing to see light come up
like this - see it come into the flesh
of things - the insomniac's
reward. And, falling, no, drifting, no…

filling, but really falling and
filling the air - bird song. Filling
and falling and rising. Punctuating.
First a nervous music, then the whole
hum and shake of it, as if light
itself were made of this sound,
and morning had a voice.

I, the one at the window, tried
all night to decipher the language
of night - the dark stoked
with shapes, with bodies
rising from the weeds.
But I stayed inside the house
of a fraught mind.
I should have gone groping
into the field, touched each
hidden thing the way the blind
touch a face to know its character.

Now the trees, who took the first
swathes of light, are all appetite,
pressing their chests out, brown, gray,
speckled and knotted. The willow
shambles her blowsy hair,
nonchalant, as if to say, So?
Lie down, little human. You need
your sleep, Everything
will be here when you wake.
A breeze surges through, sets
them all atremble.

Published in Salt Hill (Winner of Salt Hill Poetry Award 2000)

© All Copyright, Kathleen Lynch.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.