Three Poems by Katharine Ogle
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Love Rides on the Back of a Bear
Trees speak to one another through the earth, their sentences
rooted in soil, threading the blue dark. Magnolia
to magnolia, live oak to live oak, larch to larch.
Above ground, Love rides on the back of a bear.
All animals know the way home. The cuttlefish,
the mouse, the monarch over the ocean, the redbird
never more than a mile from where it was born.
Let the bear walk across a landscape half-lit
by half a moon, Love holding on with both hands,
whether it rains or is cold, or is not the way
Love remembered getting lost. Let the bear
walk Love home all night. Let the bear’s footprints
speak to the dirt and the dirt to the trees and the trees
to the moon, and may the conversation go on and on
*
New Year
Maybe you will wake tomorrow
and the Goodyear blimp
will project a shadow
on your street
and you will walk through it.
Like yesterday, when
your foot crossed
the shape of a bird
while it spit luck into your hair.
Your hair which has grown
and lost the same three inches
all year. The year you grew
so tired, the year of Yvonne
shaking loose from the world.
The night she went dark
and the boys came
to play music
as she lay in bed failing,
her gray blonde hair
in petals around her neck.
How they closed the door
and shut out the dog,
how they played all night,
how she lived two more weeks
because of how well
they knew what she wanted to hear.
You have the right idea,
transcribing the events of the year
onto notecards and filing them
in order to see the pattern. It comes down
to animals, how all animals
become happenings. In March
you walked through a pack of coyotes.
In April you thought
a coyote was a ghost. Forests
and houses burned, you took it
as a theme, that forests and houses
burned. You felt you were being trained
for something, you felt
your lungs in a new way,
like a rash within. An orca
pushed her dead calf
before her some thousand miles.
You saw the island buffalo,
left behind after a film. In November,
a black fox, you rowed a boat
beyond a freckled seal. In December
you dried a seahorse on the sill.
*
Self-Portrait as Quotient
Because I don’t leave the house,
I don’t leave the house.
And now I’m never far from a mirror,
like I’ve grown a twin.
Most people don’t think about how
if they cloned themselves, the other self
would be a baby. Would milk until no milk.
Would slobber, blankly gnawing a wafer. Didn’t I?
These days, they call the heat index
“Real Feel.”
Mathematically it’s ninety-five. A touch of June in the shade.
Say I do leave the house. With my baby.
What is the word for the word
someone is willing to say but wouldn’t write down?
Protesters, gathered on the street corner, hoist clever and passionate signs.
Passing cars honk to agree. And the baby goes wild.
That’s funny, someone says, but doesn’t actually laugh.
That is a riot.
