There are places still.
There are places still where the past doesn’t matter.
There are places still unaffected by those who came before. Their survival imparts no help for your own, where the father is no more informed than the son.
There are places which require knowing one’s self as if we were each simply scraping out an existence under the infinite sky rather than hiding pieces of ourselves in different pockets of place, time, and memories cataloged in metropolises of past tense verbs.
The prairie in january
is a winter sail
full of the torque of the air.
vortex
a cold path
above the river
comb and brush
stream
when Emily Dickinson uses the word wrecked in a poem.
Within these harbors of cold quiet
there is a wilder silence
between the wintering goldfinches
and the rustling of the dry oak leaves.
but the light’s not gone yet,
the light’s not gone yet.
