The Calling
Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees,
I think how I have taken a stranger's life and whispered not
so much as his name to the asphalt sky.
How each year, on my mother's birthday, I hear the warbled rasp
of his breathing and it pushes and draws me like a blues harp
soaked in whiskey from which the bent yawl of reeds
becomes the song I have to play.
Biking that night, decades ago, I felt the desert wind coming over
the ridge
meeting the November valley air, spermy smell of fennel
and ceanothus,
past the oak and Manzanita, past the cereus and chaparral grass,
past the cornering lanes, past the houses I mistook for home,
past the church at Mt Carmel with its weathered perfection.
If I was drawn to him, no line was visible. There were no lines.
Just a mountain road, uphill tick of my pedaling,
and his downhill whir of speed, the sound of his nylon jacket
flapping,
then click of handlebars, crush of steel and skull.
Beside the road where we lay, an owl called. Listen,
I thought. And I heard how its voice survives each question,
how each question survives the shadow of clouds.
And I called to my stranger that I might hear his voice,
knowing not even his name. I called to him and he became
to me like wind on a flag pole, wind in a tree,
something moving that cannot be moved.
(Ploughshares, Spring 2013, all rights reserved)
