I Walk

I

In a bleak north wind I walk out past the lavender rows to watch swans lift from the tulip fields. Lift and recede until they are mere flecks against a thunderhead. And left here in the mud and the wind, alone against the mountain, I seem as small as I am.

II

I walk and walk, out past a line of dark firs, past the lime kilns and the cannery ruins, past the jetty bracing its dark waters, out through dusk and into the quiet vastness of night. I walk, feeling my legs, touching the sky, breathing breaths, thinking it, no, saying it aloud:

If all these stars are dead, tell me what dead means.

III

I walk out past stands of oaks to the lighthouse at Lime Kiln, where the wild foxes live. Above me a hawk hovers, haunting an expanse of seagrass. I see how gently it folds its feet into soft fists as it flies.

The foxes are out in a light summer wind. Skinny and quick. Tracking rabbit-trails, sniffing tufts for fieldmice. I follow a trail that twines boulders an ancient glacier lost here like teeth. I step to the lip of the bluff to look north for whales. The heads of seals bob in the surf, slick and silver as mercury.

I come here to remember myself. How mutable, how like a cloud I am. Like wind. A fox turning on a scent. Grass. A hillside, greening, ungreening in its seasons.

How mortal I am. How eternal.

Andrew Robin is the author of something has to happen next, which was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, good beast, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and Stray Birds, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship and a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He lives with his wife Sarah north of Seattle on Sx’wálech (Lopez Island) in the unceded ancestral waterways of the Coast Salish peoples, where he works as a registered nurse.