Look What Followed Us Home

Sand hill cranes turn and return in flight over Ojo Caliente,
sea foam cresting on a wave of sky

Are they coming or going?
Are we coming or going?

We are invaded by a terrible notion
splitting the seam of sanity:

What if we are somehow not part elk, or star,
or grasshopper patient on tamarisk branch?
Not river running over quartz boulders
to a copper cadence of gurgle and gush,
not the Romany or Churro’s soft bleat in the early morning’s herding,

not the one that tends the sheep,
but the one fast asleep, beneath the haystack?

And our ears, grown deaf
to the circling cry of cranes
inside Byzantine polyphonic whiz of traffic,
crisp tumble of  leaves through gravel, distant rumble
of 18 wheelers, those camels of asphalt,
shriek of jake brake.

How could it be that I have forgotten how to tat,
as my Nana did?
Or how much salt goes in the soup?

What will I do when I can no longer render fat?

The cranes swirl both towards and away
and say by their unanimous flash of underbelly wheeling white
that it is possible to remember.

Perhaps not the whole cloth,
but the adorning stitch.

Perhaps not the whole song,
but the first few chords
and a bit of the lyric.