Tankas from an Ordinary Day
The cup is gift bowl
is still pond is pine-lined lake
is teeming ocean
is first offer you bring, brimmed
your hand as sure as morning
*
Chaste salts cloister in
my kitchen—gray, pink, black, flecked
raked, mined, smoked, flaked, all
discreet as nuns—too much salt
proclaims the cook is in love
*
Our hill-hike stretches
eyes across valley’s denseness
Humans and houses
We climb on, finding our place
where the lupines grow sparsely
*
Mother doe car-killed
Her younglings wander gardens
scented with danger
We are all orphans—let us
feed each other yucca blooms
*
Jupiter—Venus
Heaven’s bright evening bodies
in moon conjunction
Blanket of night pulled to our chins
Our orbits twined (∞) and constant
• • •
Eileen Earhart Oldag (she/her) writes from Boise, ID, and is indebted to her poet colleagues for their equal portions of criticism and encouragement. She was a cofounder of Upper Gladstone Writers’ Workspace in Shreveport, LA. Most recently, her poetry appeared in Harpy Hybrid Review and Writers in the Attic anthology.