K.A. HAYS

FROM MY POCKET ON A HIKE, A TONE WARNS ME

The end of the Paris Climate Agreement,
says my iPhone, stacking up notifications,
& meanwhile moss
mounds gentle on a boulder, moss,
green as green as greening—
a vertical happiness of spore and spread,
soft loops one to another, this
for five hundred million years,

slow to some—
time for the perceiver
isn’t time for the perceived—

but neither fast nor slow to the rocks beneath me
holding their past liquid selves that swiveled
& turned, accepting,
while far off but parallel to me, a goose loiters
in an insecticide field, intoning a warning (or something else)—
which I project onto the goose to mean
I’m lost, I’m lost.
I’ve lost my way.

K.A. HAYS is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Windthrow (Carnegie Mellon University Press). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review and Best American Poetry. She teaches creative writing at Bucknell University and directs the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets.