BOSQUE DEL APACHE, NEW MEXICO 
 
For the Bosque del Apache
we've lugged scopes and binoculars
to this most beautiful of wildlife sanctuaries, its backdrop
of mountains drifting towards the sky. 
We drive alongside canals dug to keep fertile
the rich farmland.   If we're lucky, we'll see snow geese
wintering.  On his tribal lands, it's hard
not to think about Geronimo, captured, finally,
and shipped off to Florida.   Resisting to the end,
he died of pneumonia, the old man's disease. 
We like to remember him fierce.
His usurpers, the ranchers, made their mark
for a while. The government made recompense:
these acres, this sanctuary open to nothing but sky
and birds: cormorants, pin-tail ducks, marsh hawks. 
The harvest over, they feast on its remnants of corn,
wheat berries, alfalfa.   We're content to do nothing
but sit and watch snow geese preen and court.  
Mainly they feed, their trip from the Arctic much longer
than ours to get here, more arduous
and wired into their brains for millennia.  
When a sharp-shinned hawk ventures too close,
the snow geese lift off and we follow them
as the flock shapes and reshapes itself.  
No one gets left behind.
 
 

THE SOUNDS LONELINESS MAKES 
 
Not that he needed to tell us he was lonely. 
Not that he wasn't welcome to use the bedroom
that was my brother's grown up, enlisted. 
But those nights I'd lie awake
hearing Uncle Red's footsteps as he climbed the stairs.
Was he drunk again?  Then the thud of his shoes
as he dropped them, the fierce wooziness
of his snores. 
 
Childless, he had been fatherly
when all we knew of father was distance.  Giving
when all we knew was stricture.  Summers,
he drove us to the beach, one arm on the wheel,
the other edging towards Aunt Jo's knee, stopping
for the hair of the dog that bit him.
 
So I never said anything of my fear
that he would push open my door, fall on top of my bed. 
Thinking, I don't know what. 
To protect him?  To protect myself from saying?
Then he didn't come home.   One night, two:
found in an alley in the South End.
 
My father identified his body at the morgue.
No sounds
when he got home. Just the tightness of his jaw,
a look that said,  Don't ask.   
 
 

THE BLUE TENT
 
Two miles up from the nearest road, we collapse
at the edge of a lake, lungs and hearts stretched
almost to the breaking, the trail steeper and more rough
than we'd imagined.  Resting, we trade theories
about the audacious blue tent being dismantled
on the opposite shore.
 
Clouds bloom up white and friendly
while we watch two figures move toward us,
backpacks rising above their heads, their tent scrunched
and stuffed.  At first, they are simply color:
a slow red shirt, beige shorts.  
 
As they move closer, we see a man
and a woman. He walks with two canes, stops
often, lurches ahead.  She pauses with him,
as if the journey were old and eternal
and they were two Buddhist monks, no destination in mind,
no haste, just the journey and its conversations
about the nature of time, the pleasures of dawn
and morning coffee on the mountain.
 
Descending, they float over boulders and stout blow-downs
as if the angels of the trail were on alert
making cushions for their boots, the gentleman of two canes
waving them away as he digs in and vaults from precipice
to precipice, his mate running to catch up.