Clade Song 14

Tell me the story again about the tortoise and the hare

I mean
            the turtle and the rabbit,
how they raced, I mean how
they decided to
            or the part where they were
            moving as fast as their bodies
            could carry them.
Not only my memory of it,
            the story, but yours, too,
            or not either of those,
but of the rabbit’s surety,
            or was it the turtle’s persistence?
Tell me about the weather,
            the dull dust summer sun
            or the thunderheads blooming
            in the blue distance.
Tell me about the cool green
of aspen. I mean willows, I mean
            the place of rest where rabbit
            lay down.
Tell me about perseverance
and resting as acts
of resistance. Tell me
how doing nothing solves it.
Tell me about
how poets always confuse
astonishment with awe.
            Tell me about the delicate arch
of the white hind foot,
the sensuous curve of shell.
Tell me we are close,
            that we are
coming to the end.
            Please tell me
how to begin.

Jory Mickelson is a writer, educator, and storyteller whose first book Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press) won a 2020 High Plains book award in poetry. Their second and third books All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and Picturing (End of the Line Press, Canada) are due out in 2024. Their work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Court Green, DIAGRAM, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jubilat, Mid-American Review, and other journals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and have received fellowships from the Dear Butte, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Lambda Literary Foundation and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They were also a 2022 Jack Straw Writer in the Jack Straw Cultural Center’s Writers Program. They live in the Pacific Northwest. To read more of their work, visit www.jorymickelson.com