COVER

Equidistant

On the road to the bay a deer charges

head down to the fragment of shoulder through scrub.

The water fails in its austerity every six hours

and has the cheek to return to converse with the grasses

and spoor that go on in other seasons whether or not

we drag by. The sky unstuffs from earlier versions

of gray. I don’t notice it moving, its weight

guiding us. The woman I’m with, a novelist, keeps

track of our miles. The scene hides what it can’t tell,

she says as we catch a path nearly cupped by the many moist

weeks before. Grudged fog. Around us, the tufts

of eager shrubs. We arc along a trail hardly wide

as a waist, close to the hawks. Everything’s fine. I am

barely touching the barren and no matter

where I am I can see far to the center.

At the Mayo Clinic

Even where people claw to an edge,

there is a way

to watch distance and witness a foothold. I’m a lucky one.

Not sick.

Over polished linoleum I’m taken through hallways

to a monitor that shows one corner of what lives

high on this building:

a mama falcon fountained

by wind on its scrape with her clutch. Spiraling pines.

The next morning I watch only a scant

smear of nest and unhooked

dust. Around me, diagnosis and unsturdy last

moments, wounds and trouble. Day after day

patients fold round

to watch the screen for fledglings’ throats. Shy feathers

or even not much

but winnow. The sky is

a stark hole

to a home with mouthfuls

of reaching need. To be not alone, we continue

to look, to be not

only bodies of cords and tubes.

A slight flap, some moving

black matter, and all lives are a test, unknowable,

the hope of a flight.