Two Poems

by Andrew Robin

Time Goes So Fast in This Empty Country

On a scorcher I like to sit in the shade
and drink a Coke and imagine every
living thing that's had to die to keep
me alive. Thank you, zillion field mice.
Thank you sixteen-and-a-half sperm
whales. Thank you glaciers, thank you
innumerable Vaux swifts, thank you
vast seas of evergreen trees. A Coke
to you! America, I have a dream
in which we all walk down a crowded
street and file headlong into a shredder.
O the wolves of northern Idaho shall
feast like kings! O how green the endless
monarch breeding fields will be!
But that's crazy.
I love the sound of popping the tab
on a fresh Coke, love those first six
gulps and the nearly unbearable
burn in the throat that feels like
paradise/hell/one million dollars.
If I could drink a million dollars
I'd want it to hurt like a Coke.
Thank you world aquifers. Thank
you most of the cougars. Thank
you every third river on earth.
Thank you turkeys, well mostly your
breasts. Thank you steers in your
stalls, thank you lifetimes of chicks
with your beak-points seared off.
A Coke to us all! A Coke to the
dead-ass moon hung in effigy
as if some kind of warning.
A Coke to you worms churning
the soil underfoot: all our lives
we forget you. We forget
ourselves, too.

How Easily Worlds Come and Go

I am out hunting eagles.
It's a cold and lonely job.
One squats long hours in
the vetch and salal, or lies
still among torsos of driftwood
and tries to think like a salmon.
The yearlings are easiesy
to kill. They'll swoop down,
curious, to a fake bull elk call.
I like to shoot an eagle at sunset,
or just before the sky breaks
into rain. Love that sudden
lurch in the midair majesty,
the deep thunk they make
touching down into loam.
(Skinning an eagle is
a completely other thing.
There are eagle-skinning
poems for that.) I love the
instant of wanting before
a big bald one breaks free
of the firs. That cold blue
gunmetal smell. The near-
panic of greatness. The
timeless forever in which
one waits to annihilate
beauty. All the great
winners of wars
know about
this.

Andrew Robin is a cardiac nurse, a cancer survivor, and the author of three collections of poetry. Honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, a PSA National Chapbook Fellowship, a Distinguished Teaching Award in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a DAISY Award for exceptional nursing from the University of Washington. He lives with his wife Sarah north of Seattle on Sx’wálech (Lopez Island) in the unceded ancestral waterways of the Coast Salish peoples.