PoetryMagazine.com Ingrid Wendt

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Since 1996 Volume XXI

Ingrid Wendt

Ingrid Wendt’s first book of poems, Moving the House, was selected by William Stafford for BOA Editions’ New Poets of American Series. Subsequent books have won the 1987 Oregon Book Award, the 2003 Yellowglen Award, and the 2004 Editions Prize. For more than 30 years she has been a visiting writer at all educational levels, throughout Oregon as well as in Utah and Washington, and as a Fulbright professor in Germany. Her newest book is Evensong (Truman State University Press)

One of Those Things

If God made everything, who made God? I ask them, and How on earth

do storks get babies into the hospital? Anyone else, I ask, have questions

like this? The ones grownups

don’t know how to answer? And with them it’s easy, this playing with wonder,

keeping alive what knowledge would have us deny.

Together we rescue the Right

Brain: students the age of my own daughter, the son I never had, writing,

Why don't fish drown? Where does the black of the night sky begin? Myself

still unable to grasp how the sky just keeps on going, or how

the reliable sea could just last week become

other: oil spreading from just one tanker farther than any human

vision: birds, fish, otters washing ashore in numbers like stars

all of us long ago stopped

trying to count.

Today not asking where but when it will end: that infinite sea

with all its unknowns, once within the grasp of what we still could imagine,

grounding us.

One of those things we knew was forever, for sure.

From Evensong, Truman State University Press, 2011