Fear Is the Day That Isn’t Ordinary by Linda Dove - Rattle: Poetry (original) (raw)

It is not the alarm clock and the coffee

and the work. It is not this morning,

when I read poems and had time

to shave the hair growing from the backs

of my knees. For a long time, I watched

a sparrow shoveling water out of the birdbath,

using his bill like the bucket of a bulldozer.

I ate apples I pulled from the tree.

This morning I watched the news. I saw

the kennels we’ve built to hold the others—

the children and the mothers and the fathers—

and I know that I can decide I don’t want to

travel, which is another way to lose.

I can afford to stay in one place. It is a luxury

to call a home home. To see your name

on a gravestone. To know the local words

for first light and water and help.

To look at the apple’s skin and not see

a map or a shroud. I know where I belong

at least some of the time. I know there is a jar

parked on a mountain high above the border

between Arizona and Mexico. It holds

notes—the voices of hikers and star-gazers

who followed a canyon wren off the trail.

It is full of the ordinary past—weather,

dates, names. Nothing special, nothing

like what those bodies hold, crossing

below it. Sometimes, on an ordinary day,

I think of the fact of it, hovering over the desert

like its own country, those dispersals

casually trusted to the earth, the way we offer

bits of ourselves to the air when we sing.