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      July 1, 2018Fear Is the Day That Isn’t OrdinaryLinda Dove

      It is not the alarm clock and the coffee
      and the work. It is not this morning,
      when I read poems and had time
      to shave the hair growing from the backs
      of my knees. For a long time, I watched
      a sparrow shoveling water out of the birdbath,
      using his bill like the bucket of a bulldozer.
      I ate apples I pulled from the tree.
      This morning I watched the news. I saw
      the kennels we’ve built to hold the others—
      the children and the mothers and the fathers—
      and I know that I can decide I don’t want to
      travel, which is another way to lose.
      I can afford to stay in one place. It is a luxury
      to call a home home. To see your name
      on a gravestone. To know the local words
      for first light and water and help.
      To look at the apple’s skin and not see
      a map or a shroud. I know where I belong
      at least some of the time. I know there is a jar
      parked on a mountain high above the border
      between Arizona and Mexico. It holds
      notes—the voices of hikers and star-gazers
      who followed a canyon wren off the trail.
      It is full of the ordinary past—weather,
      dates, names. Nothing special, nothing
      like what those bodies hold, crossing
      below it. Sometimes, on an ordinary day,
      I think of the fact of it, hovering over the desert
      like its own country, those dispersals
      casually trusted to the earth, the way we offer
      bits of ourselves to the air when we sing.

      from Poets Respond

      Linda Dove

      “This poem addresses the separation of families and detention of refugees, asylum-seekers, and border-crossers from Central America to the U.S. In particular, it tries to address white privilege and unexamined citizenship in the face of what’s happening right now to these migrant communities—the way that American whiteness takes so much for granted about its own position in the history of this region. By the way, the story about the jar is true—I was hiking in Organ Pipe National Monument in 2000 and found a jar stuck between some rocks off the trail. I thought it was trash, but it turned out to be a time capsule someone had left in 1968 and others who had stumbled across it had added to over the years. I assume it’s still there, although it means something very different to me now than it did back then.”

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