Earth Day
The starlings live one neighborhood removed from mine.
So dark, they remind me of moonless nights when it’s just
the universe and stars—
How far away they are, those stars.
They don’t even know we’re here.
Does this love ever stop—this love for dirt and wind—
flowers from a hundred different countries live here
and yesterday, at my mother’s, out underneath some shrubs
where the vegetable garden used to be, two more blooms
I can’t identify, although
I’m pretty sure one is an anemone. I don’t know
how they came to be there—maybe starts from Katie
who used to live next door.
The flavors of being alive come and go. All night
nature builds and tears down. In the morning, nothing is settled.
The claws of otters
and eagles, rabbits, voles, a whole
extended family of squirrels, above and below, the quiet
clicking. Some animal over the cold snap—I suspect
a rat—snuck into my garage and stole an overwintering
begonia bulb from its pot. Never mind. I can buy more.
From behind the clouds a glimmering sun erodes
the edges
And music rides on waves of its own, its colors
intertwining with the honeysuckle in overwhelming fecundity,
the spirit house on its pedestal.
What a good child, the sun says and pats my head.
I sway and grow toward the light.
Chris Dahl hopes to cup a handful of murky pond-water and reveal another world half-hidden in this one. Her book, Not Now but Soon, won Concrete Wolf’s 2024 Louis Award, and Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts, a chapbook, won the Still Waters Press “Women’s Words” competition, besides poems appearing in a variety of journals plus nominations for Best of the Internet and Pushcart Prizes. A board member of the Olympia Poetry Network, she shares her life with her husband and a tuxedo cat once named Minnow but now called Sylvie.
the water and the gills 