Staying In This Year
Michael Rogner
There’s a resolution. Make more soup. Maybe even cold
soup in summer. But no peaking –
another resolution. Let the summer soups
simmer when the orioles return to weave
colorful baskets and Nina steps away
from the piano to raucous applause. Soon there will be
no more. I should call my mother more often. I should
come home in a good mood. I should
be grateful as a mongoose.
So that’s what I’m going to do.
This will be the year where the frayed loose ends
unraveling me will be retied. Mike found
a Harris’s sparrow by the tracks on Christmas.
These birds winter in a different desert
so why is this one here? Does it know
that something – most likely
in its own fragile brain – has gone wrong?
Does it realize there are no others of its kind
for 1,500 miles as the sparrow flies? There’s a resolution –
be more like a wayward sparrow. Slouch and rest.
Eat seeds. Make new friends. Warm my face
beneath the cottonwood. And in May
when the shortening night beckons
my return from where I came
go there singing.
Michael Rogner is a restoration ecologist, self-taught poet, and husband battling stage IV cancer. His work appears or is forthcoming in Willow Springs, Minnesota Review, Crab Creek Review, Barrow Street, Moon City Review, and elsewhere.