Chasing a Word

Van Gogh painted haystacks. And sunflowers.

Another painter – I can’t recall his name –

Gave us portrait upon portrait of

The same woman. He knew the

Countryside where her breast

Swept gently upward and then descended

Toward heaven on the long highway

Of her arm. Still, there was

Mystery.

I know a word that sits each morning

In the leafless top of an old tree

Outside my window. I chart the

Shifting shadows on its face as the

Rising sun moves from solstice to solstice.

In moonlight, its wings glisten like a

Newborn lamb in the halo of a shepherd’s lamp

When breath leaves luminous tracks

In the air.

In the woods, I keep a discreet distance to hear this word

Speak itself to snake skins and mouse burrows and

Tufts of rabbit fur caught in sagebrush.

My journal fills with awkward translations: the bowed

Backs of willows paying homage to snow; Venus near

The pink horizon of a winter sunrise; the

Passion play performed in my daughter’s eyes

When a barefoot porcupine crosses

Our path.                                                                 

Occasionally, at my desk, when I am quiet and

Looking the other way, I catch this

Word among others on the page,

Like a chickadee knocking on pine cones, and I

Hold my breath. I want to see deeply, to know.

But the sound of my longing always stirs

The branches, and the word flies from the

Corner of my eye, and, like magic,

Is gone again.