1.
Freedom deceived me. All that talk
that I could do what I want, say
what I want, as I roamed these plains.
I thought this life was about me. ME!
But the earth kept revolving.
Days came. Nights. Gravity’s pull remained.
The earth took no notice of me.
It had other plans.
Smoke from distant wildfires fills the valley,
that was here yesterday, will be here tomorrow,
it stings my eyes, leaves a bitter taste.
Isn’t this the climate we intend?
I hold keen images of you, of what
we did for, and to, each other.
Days present their own struggles.
Conversations sift the hall, little words
enliven my conscience.
It is important to focus on one word,
to brood over it, or it in combination with its friends.
The climate goes on with its own reasons.
I carry my conscience further into a climate.
This is the context I try to understand:
dry rivers, old cars, kerfuffles in backrooms.
My context is what is partly known.
The unknowable gets to be further known.
The climate is both near and far.
2.
To be setting out in hat, coat, gloves
to home (home, a cottage bearing a mortgage,
utilities I pay) through mountains on a narrow road
when the sheer cliff stuns me:
layers of rock, once molten,
turned over on themselves forming lines
that reveal the brutality that formed the earth.
It adds to the day’s torque I feel.
So much I did.
So much I could have done.
Why am I here?
What will I do with my time?
3.
I’d like to think I have a higher purpose,
but instead, I’m like everyone else,
swarmed by need in small houses
where mail arrives, TVs switched on.
The prairie sleeps and is unmindful.
There are trying smiles raised
amid nondescript grass.
I spent the afternoon trying to reach you,
then went back to bed, fell into a dream: refugees
on the move, hungry,
striving for a place of their own.
Now it’s just me with this blank page.
The time is smaller for past acts that limit future options.
We might sleep together again tonight,
giving free will to what my passion allows,
but that won’t change the earth’s processes,
all those eruptions one associates with the earth,
although it persists like a burning that does not consume.
Dale Cottingham has published poems and reviews of poetry collections in many journals, including Prairie Schooner, Ashville Poetry Review and Rain Taxi. He is a Pushcart Nominee, a Best of Net Nominee, the winner of the 2019 New Millennium Award for Poem of the Year and was a finalist in the 2022 Great Midwest Poetry Contest. His debut volume of poems launched in April, 2023. He lives in Edmond, Oklahoma.