Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

My wife and I talk a lot about retiring, debating where we will spend our golden years. Right now Cape Cod is slightly edging out Florida. Travels overseas have us go big. We dream of a small chalet in the south of France, an Italian farmhouse on the outskirts of a medieval village, a waterfront villa in Puerto Rico.

We are many years away from retirement, but the exercise gets us in touch with our priorities. We want breathtaking views in a natural environment, a sanctuary worthy of the untangled years behind us. And, of course, a place to put our books.

Today’s poem knows some environments awaken us daily to the wonders. Maybe that is paradise, a place of first permission to go on loving the world.

Refugia
by Traci Brimhall

I didn’t know I loved Kansas, with its wind skirling
through the arms of windmills, its fields gravid
with lavender, its subscriptions for sunflowers.

I thought I was pollen complaint and water hunger.
I didn’t know I loved the hopeful ugliness of cygnets,

or that a group of vultures is called a wake, or that 
a skull oxbows with a signature unique as a fingerprint.
I thought I loved to verb through the days, but spring

annulled that marriage, giving me to stillness. I didn’t 
know I would love the discourse of chickadees

in the redbud and insects at rest on my books, their legs
testing the strength of ns and os before flitting off.
I didn’t know I would love the sundial’s secretarial 

shadow. I’d forgotten I loved the blue of afternoon—
bold, bare, the white of ecstasy at its edges, the lyric

bending me over its knees. I’d forgotten how to 
recite the rosary long distance, but I knew I loved 
Latin in the shower. I didn’t know I loved using

my breath to make a page of the mirror and drawing
vines of vanishing roses with my ring finger. I didn’t 

know I loved wasps when I set the nest on fire. I only
meant to protect my son from rushing in and out 
the door, but I watched them pull pearled eggs

from muddy tunnels, and I knew. I didn’t know I loved
raccoons raiding day-old cheeseburgers from trash cans.

I once loved brass bands and free boat rides, but now 
I love hammers for hanging pictures and telescopes
for imagining a future with mix tapes of denim and 

rhinestone rodeos, my face unmasked, my arm brushing 
a stranger’s. Even now I love the stout pulses of magicians

and the salads my son makes from the wild in our yard—
the bitter dandelion greens, chickweed, henbit. I’d forgotten
I’m good at survival, too, that I’ve taught my son the uses

of the earth. Each day we walk one block farther, our own
sympathetic magic, a ritual to ask the world to let us return.

I know I will love tomorrow’s moon as it coats its smell
on mint. I’ll love the driptorch bathing last year’s grasses in fire.
I know hope is a discipline, but so is the dark heat falling

toward me, a citation of grief, a joy ready to welcome a late
continue, to fly open the door for my son, already running.

“Refugia” by Traci Brimhall from LOVE PRODIGAL © 2024 Traci Brimhall. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.