Table of Contents

Home

Vintage Colorado Poetry National Poetry Month Poem of the Week April 19, 2004

Linda Hogan was born in Denver and raised in Oklahoma. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs while her M.A. is from UC-Boulder. For a number of years, she taught in the English Department at the UC-Boulder. Awards and honors for her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry are varied and many.

Me, Crow, Fish, and the Magi Rooster, the smaller he is, the more he fills his chest with air and crows. He is not afraid of morning. Nor is trout afraid, leaping into deadly air. And I forget my own suspicions to follow some line even with its hook: Why don't you look me up sometime? I'm going for the lure, driving a highway, wearing all my old lives, scars on both knees and crow's feet, a history like broken fishline carried by Old Whiskers that Colorado fish, showing off his escapes. These are gods we follow, sunlight or worm, and we are trusting as chickens walking to their death along a hypnotic line of chalk drawn by the good lord or Mesmer. But the odds are good, yes they are, that sometimes we quit crowing or chasing lunch.  We forget running away and stop in our tracks to listen and hear the pull of our own voices like the Magi with their star, the wise ones with their camels, perfumes and gold, believing their inner songs, a journey in the bones of their feet, like migrating birds or salmon swimming ladders of stars to the beginning of life.                         --Linda Hogan Reprinted from Savings: Poems by Linda Hogan. Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1988. Copyright (c) 1988, by Linda Hogan. Used with the author's permission.