any of us could be swept out to sea,
By Katharine Coles
Photography: Adam Clark, VisitUtah.com
any of our hearts fly off or dissolve into blue. The given day’s mountains awash in clouds look like geology’s oldest idea, always arriving; so many lives could have been
others, full of sparrow calls, kisses, death or nights brimming with meaning — all only the usual kinds. Then, after decades, we find each other
shying away, keeping faces to ourselves; we wonder how history, after so long ticking past, at last accounted for something. Imagine a century accumulating like this
and then some. How we lose hours as often as mark them — but not this year, this hour. Once in a while we have to celebrate not how time holds
but the way it always goes.
Katharine Coles has published eight collections of poems, most recently “Wayward” and “Solve for X.” Her other books include the memoir “Look Both Ways” and “The Stranger I Become: Essays in Reckless Poetics.” She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a distinguished professor in the English department at the University of Utah.