"How to Regain Your Soul" / "Heaven" Poems

Wonder

How to Regain Your Soul by William Stafford Come down Canyon Creek trail on a summer afternoon that one place where the valley floor opens out. You will see the white butterflies. Because of the way shadows come off those vertical rocks in the west, there are shafts of sunlight hitting the river and a deep long purple gorge straight ahead. Put down your pack. Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built, when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies dance by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly, anything could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the canyon and then shines back through the white wings to be you      again. "How to Regain Your Soul" by William Stafford from The Darkness Around Us is Deep. © Harper Perennial, 1994.

Heaven by Carrie Fountain We spent months of our lives walking from Sears to Penney's, back when we were vague, a couple of ideas forming ourselves against the certainty of merchandise, in the presence of strangers, when no one knew us or wished to know us or could even perceive us as we passed, two girls, unsmiling, unwilling, not finished. When I think of what we looked like then I think of newborn horses: stunned and exhausted, still slick with the cumbersome fluids of birth. You were the leader. You'd stop at the waterfall by the food court, dig a coin from your pocket, and toss it over your shoulder into the fiberglass river, then turn, press a coin into my palm, and say, "Now you do it." We were hopeful. Our quarters slapped the water and disappeared beneath it. The little river went on, past the shoe store. And we followed it— we followed it as long as we could, longing toward this: the unseen, unwished-for present. "Heaven" by Carrie Fountain from Burn Lake. © Penguin Group, 2010