All Over the Place: New Year’s in the Back Forty

By Michael H. Brownstein

This poem is from my book How Do We Create Love, with a new title.


How do we create love?

In the gum of sweet mud tracing its way through large blonde sandbars puckering

against the ribs of the Missouri, a small ripple of ice cold water drips into the river.

Early morning, and a lone woman stands in the shadow of white birch, paper

bark and dust. First a fawn comes to the edge for a drink, then a few possum and

finally a family of raccoon, hunchbacked and thirsty, the sun rising, the sky ash

and stone, a matter of cloud cover, a matter of river haze. She listens to the waking birds,

watches a coyote make its way to the water, its paws deep and strong, its eyes tired.

It wants to bray at the moon, but the moon is hidden behind thick clouds letting in dawn.

A man joins her in the shadow, takes her hand, and they watch the color of the river,

the morning psalms, the joys of geese and leaf, icicle and wind, turtle and mink,

sandstone and the mixing of earth, the simple dripping of one waterway entering another.

Silence is best in morning. Let others make the songs, let others talk, let others whisper

and shout and shake their busy wings, their long legs, their wet furry bodies,

the lightning grip of teeth, the lurch to freedom, vole and chipmunk, river otter and kit,

drops of water from rain upriver, dew in the forest glade, the gravity of brook and stream,

and the open heart of the Missouri sliding by all of this and understanding the way it is.

When the sun does come out, when the sky goes to blue, when the clouds whisper away,

only then do the man and woman begin to talk of aspiration and the shades within beauty.

Love is created in many ways. This is but one of them.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.