What teaspoon of light draws me to my knees, the sun pulling me into this weedy gulch to lie beneath petal veins and five lavender lobes? The camera dials and buttons I turn and click trespass too loudly in this late afternoon, this little spring for a cow or elk or something else, still muddied, I think, by what drank or bathed before me. I thought to take a picture of something flown, of something like the gold finch I saw riding a sunflower by a quick river I passed the other day. And now I’ve lain my whole self down beneath a wild geranium dark where rain lingers still. They call the geranium cranes bill, what I kneeled at today, half-wild and yoked here seed by seed. When will the river come again? And the white egret I saw quiet at its edge? Sun bright, I tell you, was the goldfinch before my shadow touched it and it fled.
Kathryn Winograd
A longtime educator and arts advocate, Kathy is the author of seven books, including her recent chapbook, Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic, a semi-finaist for the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Contest, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, a Bronze Medalist in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards, and Air Into Breath, an Alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets and Colorado Book Award Winner in Poetry.