Sunday, before Election Day,
we looked west from the Elkhorn Crest
two hundred miles across Oregon
at the peak of Wy’east, backlit and low
on the horizon, and up to our knees in snow
we called out, as desperate people do
or so I’d once read in a Russian novel.
The wind carried our pleas
exactly nowhere and to no one,
because the wind, as in Russian novels,
was in our faces then as now, four years later
and we’re still fostering this stubborn
urge toward more buoyant songs.
What rights, after all, did the words
others wrote down long ago guarantee
and for whom—some sort of bond
we’re free to forge with agencies strange
as this blue scattered by falling snow,
its chill still rippling through us like a wave?
