1.I was standing by the kitchen window, looking out at the woodshed. I wasn’t thinking. I was drinking coffee out my green mug. First an Anna’s hummingbird (female) to the feeder just beyond the glass, then a rufous (female), the first I’ve seen this year, tiny, hungry after its long flight from Mexico. Yesterday there were bees in the daffodils. When the poet wrote, “what I want is less clear to me/now than it was then“, I wanted to say, yes.
2. They come for days, weeks, then there’s absence–blue emptiness. Yesterday at lunch, one, then two, calling for seeds. Did they know I was planning an indigo vat?
3. I wasn’t thinking. I reached down to move a pot of newly sprouted argula and the bee grazed my hand.
4. The pots of salad greens are on the upper deck. The olives have bright new growth. I am slowly sweeping the greenhouse floor. Nearby, 3 bags of beach stones wait to be placed along the long edge of the greenhouse–a shoreline, river’s edge.
5. She wrote, “to forgive myself as others/have forgiven me,” and oh, I want to say, yes, yes. (But have they?)
Note: the lines of poetry are C.D. Wright’s, from “Against the Encroaching Grays”, published in The New Yorker, March 24, 2025.
...Theresa Kishkan 