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      November 8, 2020NovemberHeather Altfeld

      It’s strange, here, waiting for the last of them to be counted,
      surreal to think of them shoveled into piles like old snow,
      cast out into the world over land and sea to seek, as it were,
      their fortunes. I imagine them in the late terrible light
      of those rooms, lingering in the stink of yesterday’s lunch
      and the air tepid with breath held back by masks,
       
      talking amongst themselves about the ludicrous folly
      of humans, who should be tallying the tadpoles
      who grew into frogs this year and the number who died
      of fungi blotched on the nose, how we ought to jam
      the phone lines demanding a raise in the minimum age
      for kindness, a cut in the statutory limitations on human cruelty,
       
      a referendum to mortar our cities
      from the endless migration of sadness and despair.
      Where is the measure in favor of clouds
      not yet dreamed or stolen by the sun?
      Who will root for the tulips we’ve planted so dumbly
      in the dry crud of the earth?
      Call it now, for the rivers and the trees and the rocks,
      call it now for the rain, who knows far better than we
      how to become one fierce or gentle thing.

      from Poets Respond

      Heather Altfeld

      “I think this poem is a collision of two kinds of waiting—both are temporally communal, which makes them particularly interesting to me–the counting of the vote, and here in California, the rain, which we are all desperate for. Both portend our immediate and distant future. And despite the critics of personification, there is something about the convergence of such energies that each ballot carries, beyond its bubbled-in dots—each arrives (hopefully) from the homes of smokers or drinkers, chewed by dogs or babies, spat on by rain or dissent, and in this way, they seem to harbor a strange sort of essence of their own.”

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