A Story

There is a woman who lives on a bed.

She is awake

watching the magpie that comes each morning.

Awake, she listens to the creek downhill,

and how one bird answers another.

She smells the moist earth at sunrise

and memorizes how light

falls each day through a different angle of the window.

She read about a bedfast woman who heard a wild snail

eating leaves beside her bed.

She, the woman, lived with that beautiful snail

beside her. Soon they knew one another.

In my world such a true connection is honest love.

So I too wanted snails.

But I live already with wasps

here many generations who know me well enough

to ask to be let out for daily chores.

They hunger and thirst in the fall

so I also feed them

before their deaths

then close the windows and doors against winter freeze.

Each night, too, I hear, feel, and love the cat,

softly purring beside me.

One cold night I went outside to look

at the lynx who appeared from a Northern constellation.

God knows there are medicines

walking forward in the cold of winter.

Here, the most powerful

is the walker on stones, rock walls, water or ice.

I know her lookout; mountain lion, up there on the stone,

and she knows mine.

For her

I was named as a child.

We are kin of the same ilk,

and always I want to walk away with her,

the young, across the winter shine of the universe,

away from the body curve still warm in the bed.