Lord Quiet
How are we to know as this earth spins idly,
no one at the controls but you and I?
How the light comes up only when we look
nuzzling like deer against one side of trees,
stink bugs, honeybees, daffodil water-bugs, and fleabane and lodgepole pines knocking
elbows
in the wind wearing woolen shirts.
It's cold ninety below zero
and Father curses loudly as he stomps
starting the new diesel in the old snow.
Thirty-odd years earlier it is now,
a wood-paneled Ford blue
station wagon churning away outside
the streetwise door. And he in his Stetson
purchased when we moved west from Illinois.
Mother and I saying the rosary;
praying the school and the new kids will be
clean and well lit, not dim and menacing
like the insides of linoleum bars
between here and East River where we stopped when we could not see the center line
or even the sloped shoulder of the road.
Lord Quiet, a rangy coyote, waited
in his own sparse shadow against a drift,
crossing a tree-lined street pausing to taste
the air for a mouse,
a freezing house cat,
sagebrush voles, or monsters. He has a song.
He carries all his best songs in his legs.
Window glass rattles and crystal snow storms
uphill in whorls that stay close to the ground;
hums to the four-way and takes off again
spidering
like windshields and rocketing
skyward suddenly rapturous and gone.
Vanishing like machinery. Like breath.
And no one, not me anyway, is there
at the tired wrenching of a winter day.