wind follows wind,
as would the grasses
were they not rooted –
relegated to whispering
wayfarers’ songs
this evening I carry
that elsewhere urge –
a glow of foot,
the rise of thigh –
the sort of sky to set
wings to trembling
© Sarah Whiteley
you be flotsam,
I’ll be jetsam,
and together
we’ll be details
of the sea –
each the other’s
favorite
minutiae
© Sarah Whiteley
if my last day would perish
so beautifully as this,
I would not mind at all
we could both go golden then,
full of road and sky moments
me following this light,
lighter and no longer envious
of “as the crow flies”
© Sarah Whiteley
Photo taken east of Snoqualmie Pass overlooking Cle Elum Lake
today everything I know
is somewhere else
except that the ivy has been
trying to come through window
I remember the last time
I crawled through a window
that was Mexico though,
with the moon low over the sea
and the slow procession of
turtles moving up the beach
today everything I want to know
is somehow elsewhere
tangled up in the pink
of the bougainvillea
© Sarah Whiteley
the question, always the same,
and the answer is that there are
so many blessed nowheres
she says she’ll have to find me
when I finally get that car,
when I finally succumb to go
she knows that I can write about birds
for only so long before I myself fly –
after so many years feeling
stuck and prayerless
the answer isn’t to find me
or to seek anything anywhere –
but if you begin to look for me,
try roundabouts nowhere
© Sarah Whiteley
when, as now, the city leans too close –
all cloying constructs, relentless cement
send to me a comfort of simple pine,
send to me an endurance of wind-bent cedar,
give to me the remoteness of ridgelines
and a full solace of placid tarns
what Muir meant made blazingly clear
with each leaden municipal minute
wildness is a necessity
© Sarah Whiteley
on days when I cannot be here –
in the sense that my vigor
for living rebels –
I can instead be tucked
among the clutches of brush
on the high plateau
can instead snaps bits
of silvery desert sage,
crush it, inhaling –
we are both of us escaped
and wilder here
© Sarah Whiteley
that August in Livingston,
we meant just me
and the small dog tracing
the bends in the river
into the far edge of afternoon
one of us thinking of rolling
ourselves into the landscape
for keeps just for the peace,
the other enthralled
by sudden bursts of magpies
all these years after,
I never did find the right shade
to fade into and can’t shake
the sense of going the wrong
way against the river now
as if home had quietly
washed itself downstream
and settled on a sandbar –
lopsided and forsaken
© Sarah Whiteley
I never was in so much trouble
as that time I vanished down the tracks,
losing sight of the afternoon,
small shoes balanced on the ties,
walking into evening between the rails
even at that age I could name goldenrod
and dog rose, Queen Anne’s lace and sumac –
could pick out moths from butterflies –
but had not yet discovered the word
for that unrelenting itch to wander
but mother knew the word and four miles later,
I was spanked all the harder
for the future loss of her daughter
who would disappear along the tracks
to find solace down some dusty road
© Sarah Whiteley
thinking of those days behind the wheel, cat stretched across the dash, exemption stretched out along straight, gray highways
trying now not to swallow that hook, though lately it seems the city hates me, shoves me toward her swilled-to-the-gill gutters
back then, there was the bag kept in the back and it didn’t matter that I had to crawl through the driver’s side window to get back behind the wheel
what mattered was the chance to get out of here, wherever “here” happened to be at that moment, and now it feels that “here” is now once more
and I miss that cat more than ever
© Sarah Whiteley
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