Boulder Triptych

    (March 22)

I. Golden Ponds
(March 19)

            After “If I Were a Bird,” Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970)

I used to call my high school teachers Sisters of St. Joe, which meant I was on close terms with both the nuns and the saint, who disappeared like frankincense into the lives of his wife and son. I like Niedecker’s poem, “If I Were a Bird,” the way she called upon the names of poets as if they were birds (not bards): H.D., Williams, Reznikoff. If I were a bird I’d live at Golden Ponds. Of all the birds we saw there Friday—my daughter and I—the ones that delighted us most were the Canada geese strolling along like courting couples as our puppy strained at his leash and our little boy on his red bike called, Watch out, birds, my brakes are broke! Herons lifted off, and an eagle waited for the flash of a fish. There was no way we could have foreseen the mind of someone else’s son who showed up three days later in nearby Boulder and killed ten people. We felt lucky as we straddled the creek that raced down the mountains. If I were a bird, I’d live here, I thought. This is where I’d raise my kids.

II. Equinox
(March 20) 

            After “Person of the Playful Star: Tanka,” Tada Chimako (1930-2003)

 
If half the body is sea and half the body mountain, as the poet proclaimed before she left us (how did she know my heart would beat both Rockies and Atlantic?); and if these twenty-four hours hold equal day and night, stars geared up to pratfall at the precise moment winter turns vernal, that erotic equilibrium, that perfect wink when the sun crosses the celestial equator; and if the earth tilts neither away from nor toward the sun and here come the daffodils and hyacinths and trumpet lilies, every praisable thing warming up the world—then                                                         

half the body is
buried and half the body
rising into sun.
Who’s to say who’s truly gone
when, look!, all around us: Spring. 

III. World Poetry Day
(March 21) 

            After “I Wasn’t in This Poem,” Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021)

I wasn’t in the poem about Zagajewski not being in his poem. His poem was five lines long, and I wasn’t in any of them. Zagajewski died on World Poetry Day and I wasn’t in his poem that day or the day before. I wasn’t there the next day when ten people died far from his poem, and I wasn’t in the final stanza or in any stanza about the way human beings are both fragile and evil, depending on whether they’re in the grocery store or in the parking lot. I wasn’t in Zagajewski’s poem called “I Wasn’t in This Poem,” it’s true, and because I also never played a harmonica that did or did not get pressed to my lips (or, according to Zagajewski, his lips), I’m not in this poem either. This poem slides around in my chest. I can feel it trying to make a wound in the shape of itself, a poem, and I don’t know how to stop it.