All the Way Over Here
Yesterday you told me about planes
that don’t need engines to fly—
gliders, you said, bringing up
a picture on your phone—you said
imagine how far you could go
and I thought imagine how
far you might not
Sometimes we put our faith in things
so easily—the tents we think
will protect us from the storm,
the bear, the falling tree—and it’s
funny that often we don’t
believe in other things
We don’t believe that one of us
might one day find
something better to do,
but we also don’t believe
that both of us won’t
If I put my faith in anything:
I’d put it in cups of coffee,
in mornings where we wake
up slowly, in cheddar cheese
omelets, and photographs
of trees at night
There’s a thing I learned
about willow trees—it’s easy
to reroot them even
after they’ve fallen down
You just need a cutting
and land
and time
Such Curious Fish
Someone told me once that squid
are mostly alone
That when photographed
there is almost always
only one, flitting
past the camera, past
the divers, past whoever
is looking
And giant squids aren’t
as strong as they look
their strength not
in proportion to their size
Their dead though
washing up on shores
created so many myths
of how they could terrorize
How they could break
ships apart with their tentacles
We make such myths
of our monsters
On a video
a squid slips
past the screen
into the dark
beyond our sight
In time, another
will flicker across
the footage and
I wonder if the two
will ever meet
Image credit: Flickr
What do you put your faith in? Tell us in the comments.
Odd question and an odd answer concerning the subject of solitude. I put my faith in relationship, especially in the faith of the human relationship with the Creation.
Yes, storytelling and myth-making are a big part of that. Both these poems articulated, quite well, how we are small things on this earth, but how are relationships mean everything.