Shari Wagner’s poems have appeared in North American Review, The National Wetlands Newsletter and Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Her collection of poetry is Evening Chore (Cascadia, 2005). She was a co-winner of Shenandoah’s Carter Prize for the Essay and currently teaches at the Writers’ Center of Indiana.I want to know these scoured rocks
the way a blind woman knows her house,
understand their journey, listen
to the creak of a glacier in my bones.
I want to open the door for a pileated
woodpecker, catch splintering
water as it falls, dream beneath the hush
of hemlocks cresting the gorge and sense
in their darkness the absent river’s
surge. I want to feel the shift
of a continent, see orchids as snow falls,
then sink into pouches of jewelweed
filling Gypsy Gulch with a ginger glow.
I want to track wild turkeys
as they winter in Box Canyon, bend
low before their rafter of wings,
meet, palm to palm, my own blood-brother
in iron stains leaching through the wall.
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