Nights, Lately
Photo by Seth Owens
I’ve been stirred by the bladder of my old dog around two or three most nights.
Lately, the world outside the old farmhouse has trembled with the air of change.
A great wind ripping over the ridge has come not just from the west, but out of a volatile past.
From days when the Earth was still young and violent, to push us into an uncertain future.
On these nights the dog sits in the yard, nose to the sky
and resists all attempts to coax him back inside
and myself back to the calm, quiet bed.
A single peeper still sounds his refrain.
The rest of his kind have finished their annual orgy,
but the odd man out still calls for his own chance to kick the can of life down the road.
To the peeper, the world has not changed much,
still a primordial puddle
filled with the ooze of external reproduction.
I wonder if the lonely peeper can feel the change in the air?
The poplars can.
Standing straight and narrow, they wag their twigs in the wind like brushes,
painting the starless sky with just the faintest hint of young spring green.
A few old aspens stand, leafless still,
but soon to quake in the winds of change.
As they have done since this hillside was first cleared, decades ago.
They are the last evidence of such a past,
and they yearn for the winds to bring such a future.
Lest they fall in the shade of the taller poplars
without even a single grouse to accompany the peeper’s lonely refrain,
drumming atop their downed logs.
The wind swirls again,
bringing the feral scent of coyotes up from the ravine below.
Like the wind, the prairie wolves have come from the tumultuous west.
Out from the vast and open plains, across mighty rivers,
to this shady limestone holler on the precipice of domesticity.
Will they follow those winds still
into a precarious future the dog will not live to see?
The dog goes off, sounding alarm
That wild things still exist! In spite of the efforts of man!
Or maybe,
at their behest?
The coyotes feel no obligation to reply.
