Driving slowly on back roads nearing Crow’s Nest while listening to dead poets read their poems trying so hard to push their words through all that space and time and into me, driving so slowly a brown thrasher curved out of brush and across my windshield, his markings catching red in the afternoon sun. Running the dogs in and out of cornfields, sparrows rising up in threes and fours from scrub. Walking the margins of the long field in quiet, the dogs playing our game of hide and seek, come back and disappear, then swimming in the creek, their pleasure a palpable, living genesis of pleasure in me. Blue dashers hunting the mud and weeds, iridescent, a wonder, so lightcatching wonderful. By a meadow finding yellow chairs in shade facing a long stretch of sky and clouds and sitting to watch for unraveling minutes, the tension spiraling out, not thinking, tracking the graceful tilts and risings of one turkey vulture swinging back and forth in my sight for this time. Normalcy is the luxury, this opulence of everything moving for once in harmony.
