for Megan Blankenship

 


One bobcat, in the tea-dregs light of dawn outside Mountain Home,
AR, and then—absurd, impossible, tucking its stubbed-tail bottom to scoot
under bush, another. God, you said then, show me a third. Show me
one more, and I’ll believe. Here, in the spring Siskiyous, four does
dew-step the meadow each morning, timid yet timely, present
through the bloom and dissolution of cherry trees’ flowering, through
the heart’s slow settling of sediment, as the river prepares a bed
for the steelhead’s return and a beacon for the strange brain that sings
to them of home when they reach it. Is noticing coincidence a form
of divinity, or worship? If not, a comforting mistake. Oh yes, I reply,
when you write, Healed grows up around and inside you, unruly as blackberry
bramble coming back thorned as ever. Oh yes. Though still, one dawn,
all the regular chorus and clatter, but only three deer in their split black
ballet shoes. And the mind, limber with lions, licks a moony claw,
bounds back along the ever so delicately darkened tracks through dew.