The Talking Stick: Insights
September 2020
At dusk the cabin’s fire warms us
as coyotes howl, phonics of the wild,
the pack singing to the whitened night.
The full moon washes our log walls,
trees that gave their back to my husband’s adze,
their white flesh glistening with sap like sweat
in the summer sun, balanced one on another,
pinned with eighty-penny nails, walls that have
curbed and contained our wanderlust.
Inside these walls we have lain
three dolls, asleep in a row in the loft.
Only we are not playing at this.
They are breakable, these young ones.
Their breaths play a symphony of syncopation,
each marking a beat that says I live.
