Erasure
You walk uphill in silent snow
between silhouettes of pines
where everything is ice-clear—
the creek, rimed rocks, frozen
branches of willows. So much
we think we know can be lost—
yesterday, this moment, 15 billion
brain cells, 100 billion stars
in the galaxy. Somewhere we store
the scent of wet wool, soup on gray
days, cracks in sidewalks, an old
wallpaper pattern. A
child’s
mementos carried in her pocket
later require luggage, boxes for books,
a rental trailer pulled into a new town,
van across the desert to California
where a small bungalow holds
everything until it takes two stories,
eight rooms, so much space for
a future. How the
years fill with
the work of living, energy and matter
constantly switching places partway
between love and death. Now downsize
the new word to keep what matters
most, you study Zillow for two
bedrooms, walk-in closet, close
market, read synapse retrieval slows,
a brain runs out of niches. This morning
you can’t recall where the snow-covered
path forks, why five planets align,
the name of a distant peak against
the blue. Two deer browsing lift heads,
your eyes meet briefly before the forest
takes them back as if they never were.
Beth Paulson is the author of several collections of poems,
including Wild Raspberries, The Company
of Trees, and The Truth About Thunder.
Her most recent book is Canyon Notes
(Mt. Sneffels Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in more than one hundred
national literary magazines and anthologies; her work has received three
Pushcart Prize nominations. Paulson lives in Ouray County, Colorado, where she
teaches writing classes and also leads Poetica, a monthly workshop for poets. She
is a co-founder and co-director of the Open Bard Poetry Series in
Ridgway, Colorado. Previously, she served as a columnist for the Ouray County Plaindealer for ten years
and taught English at California State University in Los Angeles for over
twenty years. You can read more of her poetry at www.wordcatcher.org.
