i
When the loon surfaces on the flat
five o'clock bay, I realize we have
both been under water for far too long.
It dives again & I hold my breath.
A fish flips, a gull circles, a cloud lifts,
the lone roar of a motorcycle going fast
somewhere far away, farther now,
like youth ebbing into a fume of age.
I wait & wait (they say loons can dive
200 feet, stay under for 5 minutes...)
until I see its sleek head re-punctuate
this wide blue field. I feel its surge,
its buoyancy, our shared exhalation
—what is it but the desire for life?
ii
A friend has lost his brother as I lost
mine. Here one moment, then gone the next.
I want to tell my friend how time stops—
my old watch?—2:15 on that Monday—
15 years passed & I was still asking—
Where have you gone? & why am I still here?
How to accept the unacceptable.
The other day I heard a Bach sonata
on someone else's piano & I watched
my brother drive down that long, lyrical
hill from our dark yellow Victorian
in his blue VW, 3 days before I knew
I would never see him again. I want
to tell my friend—that time is a minefield.
iii
Birds flew into the farmhouse all summer
long: sun, wind & no screen door. Sometimes
they were nothing more than a small flutter
in the next room like my mind fielding one
thought to the next & they would simply wing
back out. But the Catbird would have none of
that. She dashed herself into glass, shat sills
in fear, mewed the mew that gray Catbirds do.
We were two frantic souls in the stanzas
of the house until I captured her quivers
in an old bath towel & released her back
outside—only to watch her try to fly
back in—all summer long. Catbird I say:
a cage is a thing of our own making.
iv
Equinox. A scatter of starlings. The hay
is burnished, almost burnt, waiting to be
harvested: how sometimes we want to be
cut down, threshed & meshed into something
more meaningful than our tiny, worried
lives: Money. Home. Love. Loneliness.
My car's check engine light is on again—
a hatchback that's lasted longer than most
of my love affairs & that early marriage
when I got him a green card & loved him
along the way: lost in Maine now with that
crazy millionaire who used to threaten me
way back when I could survive anything.
Pouring rain. 9.23.23. Ophelia is her name.
v
May again. Everything is being born.
Ayla, the Springer Spaniel is now two,
a teenager who skulks along the edge
of the field tracking wild turkey chicks
(a brood of 10 with 2 mothers) only
to turn away, the way all teenagers do—
in search of the new. The field is little
more than a sheen of green behind the
meddling Mugwort that's claimed more
territory since last spring: one stalk makes
200,000 seeds. How everything changes
before our eyes while we secretly insist
it will stay the same. How we too are seed:
flesh & bone, sown & reaped, here & gone.
Miranda Beeson is the author of Wildlife (Spuyten Duyvil) as well as the chapbooks Ode to the Unexpected from novelist Peter Cameron's Shrinking Violet Press, The Jones of It and Catch & Release, recent finalists for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies including Barrow Street, The Southampton Review, The Best American Poetry, Typishly & Melville House’s Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets. She received her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton.
Awards & Honors include Palette Poetry’s Spotlight Award, a Jody Donohue Poetry Prize, Chicagoland's Poets & Patrons Sonnet Award, and the support of NYSCA for her writing programs.