Meaning All Meaning Ending Here
there’s a way the crash
of a boisterous river scoring the air above itself
stops
completely
when the trail bends into a grove of trees
and the air hangs blank and clean
for a second for three seconds five total-nothing
roaring world suddenly still as
still as what?
space that feels like a living animal
beating-blood breathing surrounded with its own beingness
then not anymore
but where? how?
so much noise
up-ended (over there by the alders)
Losers
I left my wallet on the back bumper of the Jetta
after buying beer at a border store where it stayed
over 200 miles of sketchy northern highway miles
burgundy leather lump intact. My favorite
Aimee Bender story describes an orphan who finds
lost objects by concentrating on the tug of memory
awake in everything. My friends say of course you
like that one, because in the story trees remember
where they were born and the lost boy is returned
home unharmed. Of course. I used to dream
that if I got too tired to drive a big god would reach
into the car and carry me the rest of the way like a party-
weary toddler. I wore my ex-husband’s hat for years, a man’s
brimmed fedora, large on me, so that maybe for a while
my cigarette-smoking alter-ego could think the same
thoughts. We would wait out the thunderstorms
together in our bungalow’s screened porch high above
the Mississippi. My father sometimes remembers
from his assisted living facility in Chicago his sisters
are dead and the farm is long sold. But I tell him
not to fret. Those things are not where we can
find them, though we listen after them hard when they
flash back up. We lost Mom, we lost Maggie,
too much, and kitchens, rings, gorgeous songs.
What happens to the bargain we make with each other—you
stay alive while I am alive. If I am missing, please
come find me. By accident once I found myself
down a wild grassed-over field-side road in Wisconsin
with no one around and the wind whispering in
collusion. I can see that secret moment more
clearly than any face, as if that place might have
offered me a choice I lost, like a garment or a life.
Augury
hold her waist so her head can hang
into the mouth of the well backward
down in the cool exhalation of stone-water
her mother’s hand mirror tipped behind
reflects the pattern a sunlight bargello
on the oily surface the image of a man
like a black smudge in the snow she sees
him exactly black crow shot cloudward
above the frozen un-named path
Katharine Whitcomb is the author of four collections of poems: The Daughter’s Almanac (chosen by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2014 Backwaters Prize), Lamp of Letters (winner of the 2009 Floating Bridge Chapbook Award), Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems (chosen by Lucia Perillo as winner of the 2000 Bluestem Award), and Hosannas (Parallel Press, 1999). She is a Distinguished Professor of English at Central Washington University and lives in Ellensburg, Washington.Header photo of trail and grass by Pitsch, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Katharine Whitcomb by Rosanne Olson.
