Three Cows

     by Charles Entrekin

Our windshield wipers
pushing away rain,
I see three cows
standing together in an otherwise
empty pasture.

One looks up
as we splash past on our way elsewhere
as if she sees me
across our vast species difference.

And even as we are rushing forward into tomorrow
she stares out at me in silent communion
of what it means to be
at home in the world, today,
in the rain, in that simple connection,
that reasonable proximity
of simply standing
side by side
next to one another.

On Indian Shack Road

     by Charles Entrekin

Safe in our Sierra Nevada,
cool mountain breeze, listening to the
hot tub bubbling around us, we lie back
pink in the last of the daylight,
watch a pale green Praying Mantis
strike a Tai-Chi pose, become a twig
an uninvolved stick,
a part of a leaf on the deck,
and then as I’m about to speak
it happens:
the Mantis, nature’s ninja,
blurs like a film in fast forward,
snags a black bumblebee from flight,
drags it to a sudden stop.
But then the counter movement of life
swirls before the death bite,
and I watch the cellophane wings
pull free.
And as the black bee takes the air,
something inside me sees,
a second chance,
the life I have not yet lived.

Losing the Light

     by Charles Entrekin

As if you’ve been thrown
like a stone,
skipping across moments
by touching
the surface tension,
the rings circling outwards
from where you have been,
leaving you behind
in the here and now.

          Sinking,
as if you are being pulled under,
beneath the surface of a lake.

          But you are not drowning.

          Only a seamlessly closing down
and the world is still outside
in the growing distance.

          And while there is no pain,
there remains the ordinary day
all around you,
and so you ask your wife,
what happened to the light?