Calhouns Can(n)ons

A Saturday Poem

For all the ones we’ve lost or lost too soon. Life is short, fragile and gone. We are in the grave a long, long time. Right now, go buy a book of poems, find a nice corner of the world to read them in. Pet your dog. Hug your kids. Dance a little dance, hum a tune. Watch the clouds while the sun is warm and the air sweet.

The Woodpecker Pecks But The Hole Does Not Appear
By Charles Wright

It’s hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that we’ve done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.

This is not new, the orange finch
And the yellow-and-dun-finch
picking the dry clay politely,
The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can rouse them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory.

Cloud-scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.