It’s Like Wyoming
At sunset you have piled the empties and
come to the edge, where the wind kicks up
outside of town. A scatter of rain
rakes the desert. All this year’s weather
whistles at once through the fence.
This land so wide, so gray, so still that
it carries you free—no one here need bother
except for their own breathing. You touch
a fencepost and the world steadies onward:
barbed wire, field, you, night.
William Stafford
A Scale Weighs the Outer World in Pounds and Ounces
A winch,
with its drag drum and hoist drum, is strong.
Grief is stronger,
yet weighs no more than the pattern
of leaf and sun on the bark of a tree.
Joy, too, is strong,
yet changes no more than the cloth of a curtain
pulled open rather than closed.
Emotion—handless and eyeless—
runs through the body like current through copper wire.
Equally innocent of its ends, equally voracious
A scale weighs the outer world in pounds and ounces.
The sum does not alter,
whatever happens within and between us.
One will feel this as a blessing, another as horror.
Jane Hirshfield
