WALKING DOWN A SNOWY ROAD

Photo by S. Auberle

WALKING DOWN A SNOWY ROAD

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart

and try to love the questions themselves."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Walking the beach road today

I am questioning...

what drove me this year,

what force held me in its grip,

shook it's shaggy head as it toyed with me?

A pileated woodpecker raucously questions

who are you

I breathe in cold, say I still don't know,

stretch out legs long, trying to step

in the footprints of one who came before me.

Dark shape draws my eyes,

a wing lying in the snow.

Torn from the body--large,

the texture of dark velvet--I pick it up

carry it in my mittened hand.

It seems important to question this

to think about what happened

to remember that nature does not concern herself

with who lost this wing, or how...

if it was a fox came upon the bird

or coyote. The bird lived and then died

and it may be the kits of a pregnant fox

will survive because of it.

I see myself--sixty something,

carrying a wing down a road near dark...

this is a poem, I think.

So is the one-winged carcass

buried somewhere in the snow.

So too the shaggy beast,

licking its bloodied paws.

- mimi