Today's poem is by Sandra McPherson

Simple Science
       

      Our first time, I was not taking field notes.
The gift was too great to jot down.
Then together for years we bothered
wild terrain to botanize or bug.
When he watered the columned grape arbor
in his life's last hour
I didn't see the Higher Power
hieroglyph his fate in the mist.

      It is long past the season of the notebook
and the prosody of the alpenstock.
Too late to scribe with my eye
the scrub-jay fishing from a stone,
to muffle look, look and grip
my husband's wrist

      with my left that can't write.
The scribbler on some occasions
is a cloud, and, too, a corpulent eraser.
Beware of muddy, grassy diaries.
They'll entrap the snoop's boots
bent on finding wonders
in those writingfields:
owl-shat moon-bones, dark fountains of ants,
a harebell nodding as if reading.

Tweet

Copyright © 2023 Sandra McPherson All rights reserved
from Speech Crush
Gunpowder Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission