The Bluebird Diaries

"Trolling the coho fly twenty feet behind the boat,
under moonlight, when the huge salmon hit it!
And lunged clear of the water. Stood, it seemed,
on its tail. Then fell back and was gone."
– Raymond Carver, from "Cutlery"









Same old haunts of beauty.
There are days that I feel I live by the promise of prairies.
It doesn't matter the weather –
some will complain of ninety degrees
and muggy by August,
when, these days, it rains for a month at a time.
Others, by winter, too cold,
how could you go out hiking on ice!
I see prairies in my mind all the time.
Bald spots left on the earth,
so few left, as some man sitting
behind some desk somewhere considers
options to buy, sell, at least encroach.
I see them there as something like shining relics.
Archeologists in Chile have found
the largest thigh bone of any dinosaur,
having sat there right under the surface
for thousands of years, now blown
by the wind and surfaced.
I imagine walking along a slender trail
used by the Incas and seeing
the nub of a bone the size of my fist
only for it to reveal an object larger than myself.
The mind scans back over years as best
as it can, places in details, thinks of evolution,
how the skies have fluctuated,
strange gasses risen and the birds
learned to navigate swirling conditions.
That is the same as prairie.
Those old settlers saw it as gold.
Scythed away at it. Built fences, drug horses,
in one day perhaps dug
out a large band of lead plant, prairie smoke,
milkweed drenched for the love of monarchs.
Could it matter? Unlike the Incas
they were new to the place.
In my mind I stand in the middle of a rising
hillock somewhere in the middle
a prairie which here holds two oak.
This isn't me anymore.
They eye sees the circling of the hawk,
like a silhouette of flagging ash
up through the rising creeks of those oak limbs.
That isn't me anymore.
I stand still as can be and block out the highway
traffic which passes the man's
new development.
A breeze passes through me.
and lands like words on a page.