Equatorial Magazine: there’s no way around it you have to live
there’s no way around it you have to live
i listen for god's voice. demand less clarity than i used to.
when it rains, for instance, in mid-october i ask is it raining?
i am willing to let what i love surprise me & grateful, these days,
to be wrong. but i do know a birch from an aspen.
i know a magpie when i see one & a cutter too. how the body
becomes a record—covered, collected, becomes a question—
who will be a willing witness? living with a chapel, laughing,
being told to sing, imagine—calling a room with walls
the oldest church anywhere, four billion birds in flight.
i am speaking of devotion. how the fiddle fills three voices,
fall migration, what the body knows, marked as it is for hunger.
big bluestem in a telling light, i will listen if you speak,
leave oranges for orioles, search my memory for that walled room
singing, goodness knows i make mistakes. i am asking—make me right
