—for Lyn Hopper
When I wake too early and hope and wait for more sleep,
and dawn, a coyote, sneaks up on eloquent birds, too soon
and not soon enough, and is so riveting a transition that I
disbelieve while I look and listen, knowing what I’m waking to,
reluctant to sit up, to push my confused feet into old slippers,
when I see my time as mainly gone, only here now, when I visit
through memory the many of who and what I love, beyond
physical touch, and getting up feels like a lost fight more than
having gotten through the undulating day before, I’m tempted
to gather my minor and major responsibilities, my fear and guilt,
my pain and anticipated pain, in the longest arms I can create
to reach out and surround tenderly as though all these weights
comprise my precious life and then, with monumental will,
sling them away from me, each with its own dandelion seed
parachute to ensure flight and safe landing, hoping some land
in another country, maybe Ireland, where “trouble” is a middle
name, too far away to find their way back to me, hoping some
will take their time, have a life-changing experience, and if
they return, show up different, but I’m sure that some, having
lived with me for as long as I can remember, will come back
promptly to their niches, because magnetized, they point home,
and they know I’ll always let them in.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 3.
Maren O. Mitchell’s poems appear in The Antigonish Review, Tar River Poetry, The Lake, POEM, The MacGuffin, Poetry East, Still: The Journal, The Cortland Review, Hotel Amerika, Appalachian Heritage, The Pedestal Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. Work is forthcoming in Comstock Review, Slant, Poetry East, Chiron Review and The Strategic Poet of Terrapin Books. Two poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction is Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide (Line of Sight Press). She relaxes with origami, and lives with her husband in the mountains of Georgia.
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