Acceptable Losses

 

The state has boosted cougar hunting, despite a drop in complaints, including sightings in residential areas and livestock kills. Seattle Times, 2015

 

 

No one ever saw a cougar

on Cougar Way, the street bisecting

the town center and wandering into the territory

where children play in roads without fear of predators.

 

When the houses came, predators moved up the mountains

away from the streets bordering rows of houses

with pets and trash locked up at night.

Only the lost wander down.

 

Young cougars wander in search of new territory

beyond the marks and scrapes of older males.

If the urine’s fresh, they move on;

if old, they might settle into the space left by absence.

 

Cougars are mostly absence

invisible in the roughest places where we do not wander,

where elk and deer climb high

outside the spreading territory we mark as ours.

 

The cougars who wander into our towns or slip through a back yard at dusk

are boys who know no better,

like the ones who drive too fast or dive into summer lakes

without looking ahead,

 

the ones who light out for the territory ahead

of the rest. Some make their mark, get rich.

Some become absence, wandering past

every border that would turn them, never home.

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A History of Glass

 

begins with silica,

common crystal structure

disordered by lightning that burrowed

into the desert and fused into twisted

glass branches hoarding ancient flora.

 

Volcanoes melt silica to black glass

hard and precise enough to home into a bison’s heart.

The temperatures of transformation

would vaporize us; we are too liquid.

Do not argue.

 

During centuries of snow and sun

cathedral windows appear to pool earthwards like tear drops.

Although glass is not a solid,

the windows do not yield their structure to gravity. No,

they were uneven from the start.

This is not about you.

 

The Romans made glass

to see their wine through decorative gladiators and lions

enacting the latest slaughters.

Wedding crystal slips

from soapy hands and exhibits glass’ brittle nature--

you may comment here.

 

Not all sand is silica.

Gold desert sand reddens with the passing

day. Sun glances next morning

on random crystalline sparks.

We are not random.

 

Seneca quantified: The desire to possess things increases with the danger

of losing them. But what did he know

of that which is already lost,

the wasteland of obsidian when lava cools.

 

Apache women wept for their warriors’

final leap off the cliff

and the tears fell as obsidian where the men landed.

The women still weep—as do I—

and the numbers of the story’s telling are as sand.

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Wild Speculations

 

… the writings of the plant neurobiologists suffer from "over-interpretation of data,

teleology, anthropomorphizing, philosophizing, and wild speculations."

 

If the spearmint would confine itself

to the pot and not slither across the patch

shared with oregano and calendula,

we’d have no mid-summer brawl,

 

strangulation, chemical warfare,

roots pushing and shoving like third-grade boys

who do not understand

no one wins.

 

Some roots, sensing an impenetrable barrier,

(the side of a ceramic pot) change direction

to follow the yielding soil, the nutrients;

but the mint has to be a cowboy.

 

Fixed to my house and worldly goods,

wanting more

than rain and nitrogen,

 

I do not claim plants make decisions

or deliberately invade one another’s territory:

though they occupy most of the earth--

and we animals are mere trace minerals--

plants lack neurons.

 

The mint lacks regret when it dies back in winter;

only I mourn its leaves’ lost  companionship

for my bourbon. While the mint sleeps,

I tear its runners out of the soil

and tuck the rest safely back in the pot.

 

It wakes in spring, stretches.

A natural speculator,

it might go anywhere.

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