Au Courant

by Jo Ann Baldinger

Wildfires were the rage in August
whipping up and down the West Coast.

One of them, we heard, grand-jete’d itself
clear across the broad Columbia.

We heard of cormorants sucked from flight
into the boiling river.

Downtown, disposable face masks trended big.
Will they keep me safe from harm?

What about my name, which translates as “God’s One”?
-- a common generic brand, it turns out, that bestows
no special treatment.

It’s possible that everything is comme il faut.
We get up each morning, make the bed.

Dinner parties and hospital corners are said
to be beneficial, markers of a civilized society.

Yet we have arrived at another loss, a Saxon word
that began as a wooden signpost at the crossroads

with arrows labelled Butterwick or Pingwell Haw
on the sweet presumption that God’s Ones can divine

the next direction if not the why of it. None of us
has really laughed since Election Day.