On Being

by Phillip Barron

Come home tired walk in legs sore hungry
fold a sandwich and get one episode
deeper into the show I tell
no one I watch then scroll
and tap and read and when
I uncross one foot
has impressed the other. Whatever
pride I felt pedaling morning errands
is now a pink groove across a bulged vein
on a right heel and aching ankles. I slip
out the kitchen door to restore
focus in three dimensions of a small garden
and bees work the lavender like they never
stopped for lunch. I once read
that bees see colors on the violet end of the rainbow
best. One follows me to the hose and lands
on the nozzle after I refill the stone bath
for birds which leaks slowly after a late winter freeze.
A dry hot fire weather watch day and neither one
of us can drink enough water. I begin to see lavender
reflected in everything — droplets holding fast to leaves,
notebook ribbon, alumni t-shirt, pebbles underfoot,
the aching blue sky, fear of its vast emptiness,
the tip of the towhee’s tail feathers
that steer the bird as it lands
in the tight space between scarcity and just enough.

Phillip Barron is the author of two books of poetry What Comes from a Thing (Fourteen Hills, 2015) and Bright Leaf (Horse and Buggy Press, 2022). He teaches poetry and philosophy at Lewis & Clark College.