Primary, Primal, and: With an Ear to the Earth

Primary, Primal

Mars so red in the western sky, how could it not give life?Like the face after five sprints, ruddying its blush out,color that proves to the earth, yes,                         I can move across you with speed if I must.Like the barns, just standing there, staring.Confident in their role of multiplying lives.And your sister, parked in the driveway one night, years ago,ceaselessly honking her horn                         as three mountain lions did their pacing,muscle muscling in the taillights,the red now focused on a species so brutally honestin intent that her face must have drained of its color.There's a rumor that our blood is blue inside our bodies,             but the truth remains red, the confusion lyingin wavelengths of light penetrating the skin with differentdegrees of success.Essentially, life is taken so other life can endure.                                                  This part makes sense.The ripped-open highway fox does not,                         nor how my whole life, on walks,I'd wrench a beach plum or some winterberries of their stems,just to feel their light roundness, before tossing them aside.

With an Ear to the Earth

The dam retains the food,just as days harness the bodies,keep them from thrashing wild.

We drive by a house builtover a creek and wonderhow often its tenants press

an ear to the floorboards,eavesdrop on the speechof flowing water—

ice, the unspoken,and melt, the rush of rot.Last night we saw a movie

where a man loses threesmall children to a faminghouse, and this morning

I read a book of poemswhere a man lets go hiswife to fifteen months

of leukemia. The quickand the long but still dead.Grief, like so many species

with different speeds andstrengths, wild and domestic.Consider: someone walks

into a river, choosesdrowning, as another'storn away in a food.

Do both look at the waterthey drink every dayand ask, How could you?