The Coal Life: Poems

Tracks

Tracks The day frays at the hem where pine tops sway in the whims of colors as tenuous as the sandstone gulley (a sunset itself) cut and sullied from last night’s rain. The pendulous hawk must have a home nearby, its thermals lessening to a sigh. The beaver heads for its den on the bank, and the coal barges bend out of sight. And we too have homes to tend, meals to prepare, truths to bend. But for now the loam holds us steady, and the proof of our meeting—the impressions we left behind in our stead— narrows, funneling us into one: the procession of the four-legged beast we made. And if someone were to track our path to here where we have stopped to rest (a fallen tree, a crushed bird nest), the tracker wouldn’t find the wrath 8 of silence replacing words or what we shed that left no trace. The fork where we divided from feral one again to two, no trails from where we bled, might prove the beast upright again, but who’s to judge if moral. 9 ...