Selected Poems

September 10th. I’m reading Tu Fu by Wilson Creek
and tossing bread to a trout trapped in a drying pool.
A barred owl lands on a cottonwood limb,

almost disappearing in the leaves, and stares at the fish
with concentrated attention, the owl’s arrival
startling in its silence with all its implications.

Once common here but now unusual
it asks, “Who looks for you?”
a question for the unlucky and the lost.

(So unlike me, not wanting to be seen,
not caring if it’s heard.) Tu Fu
spent the last half of his life fleeing

civil war that left two-thirds of China
dead or in exile. Waiting for the next bit of bread,
the trout fins patiently. My sandwich is gone

so it won’t come. A private jet howls over,
carrying someone rich to their house in
the Yellowstone Club.

The nation falls into ruins,
Tu Fu says,
Mountains and rivers continue.

My neighbor has rooted out a copse
of old-growth spruce
to build a metal warehouse for his camper.

The owl is waiting for me to leave
so it can eat the trout,
easy prey in shallow water,

and sounds again its call of loss and wonder,
the warm, drawn vowels like night on water.
I turn back to Tu Fu.

I feel it drifting, he says, this whole empty boat.