WHERE WE ARE

Where we are

Evolution never-really-abstract, the promise
that newness will overwhelm again like a river,
as before us, a Danish cat woman at play on TV
shows her extended nails, saying she hisses
when meeting dogs—that in early morning walks
her eyes naturally fix on birds a-flutter in the pine tree.
Of course she is averse to getting wet—and laps
milk with her rough tongue. We love her aloof reserve,
and how she purrs, encircled by her fluffy five-foot tail,
then emits a gentle meow. When she describes exhausting
night prowls leading to weekends curled in a ball,
we join with the studio audience explosion.
We see it all, as her dapper lover, poised beside her,
Sheepishly admits he bites her neck during
their screaming cat sex. Then her psychologist
touches her shoulder to support her coming out,
arguing she isn’t so unique—that many creatures
routinely mutate/already moving around us as
the newest hybrids. We speculate about future human/
animal personas destined to appear before eyes
trained not to see. What else could we be? Half turtle?
A rat with human eyes? A sentient groundhog
living in our lawns, ready to run like the wind?
A hissing possum adept at playing dead?
A shy blue heron at the edges of the civilized world?
Already a hyena evolves as a brother-in-law,
and donkey cousins watch with big ears from the paddock.
Forever we have observed mutation—tadpoles
becoming bull frogs, salamanders growing tiny legs/
shit-encrusted cows staring at us in the foggy morning.
Not so hard to believe, this cat woman magic
becoming real the instant acting begins. No matter
and no matter, for surely, we have lived too long in stagnation.
An undeniable prophetic breeze moves alongside
her languid yoga poses, her grace facing truths
routinely avoided, and I want to stop being myself.
Instead, appear furred and sleek, in dark shock
and awe, overnight evolving more than I could ever dream.

Smoke on the water

Surreal fog rises above a football crowd
sure this high school is the center of the universe,
where inner day time begins and ends.
Where the coming together is communal
stretching beyond ages. Afterwards, cars dart
alive with happy honks and I join the line
to scoop up the boy and glide back to streets
so familiar that I know each turn. But not three hundred
yards beyond the school parking lots blue lights flash
and I pull over, my heart a rattling uneven engine,
fearing an interrogation, the exposure of
the past written up as an accusation thrown before
a dark wind. A religious experience, as authority
taller than expected, an inscrutable highway patrolman
appears at my window, surely adept at reading
feckless lives—seeing to the core/surely already knowing
all there is to know. He waits patiently as I
stammer apologies, then so professional says:
“Sir, your tail-light is out,” and I feel a weight
dropping, a strange disappointment at this lack
of reckoning, this ending of drama as if the book
has closed on my shocking sins. He wishes us
a safe journey and turns to go. We slide away
and I know the boy has observed my trembling—
that together we have emerged on new ground.
He scrabbles at the radio, and Deep Purple’s
Smoke on the Water comes on with the volume
cranked bigger than our small lives, this rich saga
leaking from the ancient vault as the soundtrack
for our shared journey. We sing loud without
apology most of the way home in the whooshing dark,
the last leaves shaking from the November trees.
Alongside the New River steady flow north where
it feels like music could go on forever.
Even when the song dies, some potential waits.
Together, in this new silence, we can’t help but
wonder what other long-shelved anthem gathers energy?
Enough that a vague horizon in the lovely dark
stretches across multiple ridges, even across
the border into Tennessee, and beyond—
well into the free lands, those ancient
open skies of the Great West.
Where so much is still out there. Waiting.

Mark Vogel lives at the back of a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished fiction, and creative non-fiction, writer, and two foster sons. He currently is an Emeritus Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Poems and short stories have appeared in several dozen literary journals.