Spring Evening on Blind Mountain

I won’t drink wine tonight
I want to hear what is going on
not in my own head
but all around me.
I sit for hours
outside our house on Blind Mountain.
Below this scrap of yard
across the ragged old pasture,
two horses move
pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up
wildflowers by the roots.
They graze shoulder to shoulder.
Every night they lean together in sleep.
Up here, there is no one
for me to fail.
You are gone.
Our children are sleeping.
I don’t even have to write this down.

Louise Erdrich

When I Turned a Hundred

I wanted to go on an immense journey, to travel night and day into
the unknown until, forgetting my old self, I came into possession
of a new self, one that I might have missed on my previous travels.
But the first step was beyond me. I lay in bed, unable to move,
pondering, as one does at my age, the ways of melancholy—how it
seeps into the spirit, how it disincarnates the will, how it banishes
the senses to the chill of twilight, how even the best and worst
intentions wither in its keep. I kept staring at the ceiling, then suddenly
felt a blast of cold air, and I was gone.

Mark Strand