Another Sixteenth

of June, and I find myself
such as I am, whatever
I am, wrapped in a woolly
baby blanket at the end of the day,

perched in an armchair
at the top of an improbable
hotel in Bend, Oregon,
I didn't know existed

when the day began.
The baby has left
for a bath, and Dvorak
is tumbling from

somewhere by the bed,
ah, the hotel bed in good linen,
when we meant to be tented
down, up in the high woods tonight,

and I have a moment
when I feel sheepish and
a moment when I feel wolfish
for having found this haven

on an evening when the forecast
warned of sudden, unseemly frost,
no weather for babies, even in woolen,
under thin tents in the deep woods.

So. Dovish twilight settles
her feathers over Old Bend's
squat buildings huddled
against whatever weather,

and the very certainty of walls,
the stout solemnity of concrete
cubes reminds me, clustered under
one lone remaining, towering cedar

that spikes up seven stories
tall, that it's all woods and weather
in the long, long run, and the sheep
and the wolves are all small.