This Day
This Day
Todd Copeland
I passed across half of Texas
to be greeted by a white buffalo’s
mounted head in Marathon,
in a bar bearing his name.
I had a cold beer beneath his gaze.
This day, in the Chisos Basin,
I listened to the wind—
its variable presences,
its seemingly uniform absences—
as if for the first time in my life,
though, of course, I have heard the wind,
and forgotten it,
more times than I can remember.
You could say this day passed
without anything of significance happening,
but, even though it may have felt that way,
you would be enormously wrong.
For instance, at this late hour
I am tricked out in moths.
They congregate across my shirt,
and on my glasses, attracted
by the light by which I am reading,
and I, in turn, am evangelized
by their fluttering and soft wings.
Often, in my writing—this day
the same as any other—
I am struck by the sense
that the words are less
an extension of myself
and more the pieces of a phrase,
or even a complete sentence,
that, having always been alive,
have simply been waiting,
possibly forever, to settle into place.
This day, I said it almost looks
like the ocean, meaning the sunset
we were watching through the Window—
the rows of cloud receding,
in shades of orange and red,
from the horizon becoming breakers
rolling toward a shore—
but what I meant to say was nothing.
This morning, I watched the sun
rise over the Lost Mine Trail,
incrementally casting the trees
on my side of the ridge in its light,
as birdsong fell through the brightening
canyon on this day of all days.
Todd Copeland
Writer
Todd is the author of Like All Light (2022), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. His other works include the poetry chapbook The Book as Knife (Ravenna Press, 2021) and the narrative nonfiction book The Immortal Ten (Baylor University Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Image, The Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Lake Effect, Christianity & Literature, and Sugar House Review, among other publications, and his essays have been published in such journals as Literary Imagination, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and Media, War & Conflict. A native of Ohio, he lives in Waco, Texas.
Photography by Hans Veth