Caught Sight

1

An unexpected storm puts out smoldering forest roots, ending fire season early.

Water persists through unseeable spaces between glass and window frames. Water’s tears displace dust, leaving streaks down the walls of the subdivided apartment.

I have little time to feel.

The pants I wear to work and work alone drape perpetually over the yellow chair.

The hills turn a generous green.

Weekends are for my new love. Twice we trailed the periphery of the zoo to lunch beside the wolves for free.

Once we followed a deer trail to an abandoned barn. We used the corners of the corrugated wall as steps to dangle inward at the square opening.

We hardly breathed at two owls above the meeting of wood beams. I only saw their silent backs as they fled—our presences forcing them into midday light. 

2

A neighbor through the wall plays classical piano less and less over the months.

Another learns guitar through a merciless repetition of top fifty alternative hits.

I can admit I’m unwell. I wouldn’t call a web colorless, shifting from invisible to everything. 

The yellow mullein bloom corkscrews, searching for sun.

I turn from the sense that I know myself to the sense that I had some friends who knew me well, though I didn’t know myself to them. 

An unhatched chick turns its right eye to its outer shell. The right eye develops to find food up close. The left eye, wing-tucked, develops to see distant threat.

My uncle in grief hasn’t slept for days. When he finally does, he wakes eager to tell my aunt about his dream. A feral cat leads him to his truck where a mother screech owl and her babies nest.

Copyright © 2022 by Claire Meuschke. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 3, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this poem in the present tense, though it’s a retrospective catalog of daily life spanning two years up until the recent—nearing distant—past. I worked in Oakland, California at a nonprofit farm and lived in a studio apartment with my partner. The speaker of these strained sentences is an imaginary, revised version of myself. This poem attempts to wear misery well and to resist forgetting through a record of moments that were charmed. The speaker’s sentimental declarations are related but not identical to my own.”
—Claire Meuschke