Why I Write Not of Love

A field of damp grass, the cows
Owned by a dude ranch, the dudes

Who rent fake tents to glamp up
The slopes from here, where the views

Hold more hints of the lost wild
West, graze for what they can get.

Come spring, this field will be plush,
The wrens will sing in the oaks

Like mad, for dear life, for life,
By the stream that snakes through it

To some cool, kind shade by noon,
And the cows will trail new calves.

But for now it’s all thawed frost,
Dun straw, mud, and round cow cakes

The cows sift for what’s still green
At the cold, wet roots of things.

Sweet it ain’t, and yet it is—
Not the brown field—well, that, too—

But the day, the year, the time,
A cold pause while the world burns.

I would write I love it, but
Its not mine to love, and I’m

Not that much a part of it.
I sit on the field’s stream side,

Bag of guts, bones, points of view,
Home on wheels for old ghosts, poems,

Gods with no faith in their own
Selves, self with small faith in gods.

Let’s watch the cows as they browse.
Once in a while, a car flies

By, a truck, jets in the sky.
This is the way the world ends,

Wrote Tom. God, how I loathed him.
The light tilts. I tilt to it.

The world ends the way it was,
More changed world, and I grow cold.

What’s to love? What’s not to? You,
If you’ve read this far, if you

Are at all, know and are proof
The world did not end. Cows chew

Their cud once it’s close to noon.
You, these words. Dudes, their fine views.