Rambling With Paxton

While Sue was assisting Jayne, Pax and I went to the forest preserve at Whitewater Lake, and to the nature reserve along the Bark River in Fort. Not sure who enjoyed it more.

Decent ice, although the temp was close to 50.

Thank you, vegetables, for growing and providing nourishment.

The perfect shape.

Foundling
Megan Levad

          —for a sixty-seven-pound nugget of Lake Superior copper found in an Iowa cornfield

Before the earliest flute
was carved from a vulture’s wing,

before we—what few we were—
bowed to the moon,

the balmy, secular night,
you were coming.

Snug in the great throat of a glacier.
Still as a wish, until its sighing end.

I like to think you waited years
for us, one shoulder greening in the damp,

the other burnished by long leaves
of wheat, before we called it wheat.

Or was it loess, the wind’s fine veil,
polished you so bright we would know you at first sight?

What have you seen in the ice and the earth?
Is hell cold, or hot?

Do you pray, too? And to what god?
Or whale, or bigger rock?