Michael Daley: Upbeat Hardwired Blameless

Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect
— W. H. Auden, “The Wanderer”
~

Let’s always come back to this room.
For what it’s worth, as the place where
windows open onto a world we think of
as our own, the waves will continue
to mutilate one another in wind storms
and calm one another in the easy
frame of summer falsehoods.

Let’s not talk about what was here—
who I was or may have become
is best forgotten. Instead, the colors,
how yellow-green lichen
etch the slats someone fastened
to wire off their ruined home,
how buttercups beside the river
shine on their stained cheeks as they step
stiff and slow away, the parents
who grieve the lost boy—impish, in the distance

Buttercups are a yellow gulping sun,
they live their inadequate lives for no reason,
fill themselves and my little bit of intelligence
which is only a speck of reflected light
with a color you couldn’t see anywhere else.
.
One day they’ll find us
floating on the river as if we own the place,
an enduring wheel of hawks, eagles
and other carrion-feeders flow
above the pre-colonial merchant’s summertime stall,
bailiwick of nobody in particular
whether one owns or doesn’t own one’s own cow.

Look beyond one of the windows: three crows
are at the feeders as well as a quarrel of redwings.
Redwings the more impressive, their ‘caw’
so certain and not yet gullible in any way.
After all, the feeder’s their business
whether or not mine was the hand to fill it—
a simple means to an end, I fed that swing up
toward heaven, I was their helpless passenger.

~~~

Copyright 2024 Michael Daley

Michael Daley is a retired teacher who lives near Deception Pass in Washington. His poetry collections include Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest, Of a Feather, and Born With.