For My Poetry Teacher Having Lunch on Tuesday with Mary Oliver

When you see Mary Oliver please tell her …

Well, it’s just that there is a fox

that lives on Ridge Road and once in a while

when I am running on winter mornings

when the sky is still night,

I see it dash across the silvery patch

where the gavel path runs

down to the abandoned farmhouse in the Casey field.

You might mention that

we also have a pond. I think of it often

but rarely see it. The town always changes

the combination. The fence keeps out the deer and me

but not the teens from the apartments behind.

They cut the chain link and slip in,

drinking beer and making love in the darkness.

In the morning their empties float in the green water.

I saw a black bear just once.

It was outside a lean-to in the Smokey Mountains.

I guess it will be twenty-five years this June.

She appeared in the woods

while I was fetching water at the spring

and climbed a tree digging her claws into the bark,

paw over paw, going straight up.

Her two cubs and I watched from below.

Barbara gave me Evidence this year

for my birthday, which fell on Yom Kippur.

I hid it inside my siddur on that holiest of days

and read “Broken, Unbroken,”

while the congregation symbolically beat its chest

and confessed to the sin of not seeing god in a neighbor’s face.

“A meaningful fast,” we told each other, “A sweet year.”

On second thought,

just tell her that I am starting to understand

I don’t have to be good. Tell her this year

the rhododendrons finally seem to be getting enough water.

Maybe let her know that in addition to announcing my place

in the family of things, it would be helpful if the wild geese

would also suggest where to place the line breaks in my poems.

Tell Mary Oliver I wrote this for her.