"Walking Coy Hill Road"

A poem for this time of generous light

Quite a few years ago I spent awhile living in a small town in Vermont. Politically speaking it was a difficult time, though—as we are becoming more and more accustomed to saying these days—those difficulties were far different from those of the present. I did a lot of house-sitting then, and for awhile lived alone in a beautiful old farmhouse. I remember the grand piano, the flies swarming at the windows, and the bales of hay in the field that I would walk out to in the mornings. I worked for a local carpenter now and then, ate brown rice alone at the large oak kitchen table, and went on long walks. And then one day this poem happened to me.

Walking Coy Hill Road 

1.
Two weeks until solstice, and there’s so much light
every day feels like three days. I spent the first one eating oatmeal,
the second washing down a pile of old boards for $10 an hour.
On the third day I took a bath in accordance with the scriptures
that my body learned while floating in the womb.  
Perhaps because life is short 
we should live each moment at full volume
with the pedal jammed against the floor. 
At sunset I sat down by the pond to eat my brown rice, 
and a gun went off in the trees.

2.
I have spent time in the alternate universes
where you and I live happily ever after.
Like the one in which I am just a little older
and so marry you after all, or the one
in which we both live in the same town
and so get to know each other more gently.
But it’s no use. For us to be together now
so much would have to be different
that we would be total strangers to ourselves.
Sometimes I catch sight of us 
sitting at a table in the bakery, each of us held 
by the other, though we are not touching.

3.
This morning on the news the Attorney General said
that citizens’ rights must be violated further 
or else “our ability to catch terrorists will be more difficult.”  
These days eloquence in the Capitol is shot on sight.  
Jefferson’s thousand-volume library 
can only show us how far we’ve fallen,  
a circle of light we see above us in the dark
before the well-opening is covered with a stone.                

4.
Sometimes the moon writes your shadow
on the road ahead of you like it’s trying to tell you something.
My ancestors probably knew that language,
but I could only understand it if I slept for twenty years
at a ninety-degree angle to the nightly news.
So I walk in boots of ignorance 
hoping I’ll hear the message again in a dream, 
or that any damage I may cause 
will be healed by the next ice age.

5.
These words arrived suddenly, like large glasses of water
handed to me as I walked down Coy Hill Road at dusk.
I nearly dropped them before I made it into the house.
In fact it’s possible I left most of the gift out there in the dark 
to be swallowed by coyotes, or woven as raindrops
into the phoebe’s mossy nest.  
If anything’s missing I’m not sure I could tell. 
When you’ve lived indoors as long as we have
entire continents can vanish beneath the sea
before you notice anything’s gone.

There are those who wish for poetry to be a tool like a hammer, a means by which to either build a house or to smash one down. Perhaps sometimes a poem can be like that. Yet for me a poem is more often akin to a river that, over many years, can transform a landscape of boulders and stones into a shape no human engineer could ever have envisioned. It is subtle yet powerful, like smoke, rain, or summer wind. Goal-driven and anxious as we humans often are, I find it a relief to be a part of that larger music; to stop trying to be a hammer for awhile and instead to become a river. And who knows where that river may take us next?

This poem is from my book Miracle Atlas, which you can find out about here.

Photo by Amy Earl