Even one and one’s loneliness,
the we of our cats or the we of
two horses in the autumn field,
side to side, head to rump,
their muscular together. It’s better
with a we, my mother said to me
when I first met you, and I said
again to you last Saturday morning
as we watched the two geldings
eating apples at the farm.
And later, out of all the warblers
east of the Mississippi, two had
decided to take a bath together
under the abandoned fire hydrant.
They couldn’t stop talking, it seemed,
they had much to say. Today,
I like we in my friend’s poem. We
walked the prairie, she and I, we
banded butterflies. Sometimes
things happen to the we of our us
and it’s a good word to say again,
a word that wants to hold hands,
September, prairie just past yellow,
ready to flame into that color for which we have no name.
