What I've Carried With Me

Today I noticed my favorite boots
have lost their smell of cow manure,
which they picked up tromping dirt roads
by Vermont hay fields a couple of weeks ago.
They must have lost it in Kansas, scuffed off
in the grit of the camp lane we took back and forth,
rubbed out on prairie grasses and forbs,
rinsed in the rains, blown away
in those awesome cleansing winds.
My cats sure sniffed them over good
when I came back. I wonder
if they smelled the calcium-rich limestone,
or a breath of narrowleaf gromwell,
or carrotleaf lomatium, a crush
of burr oak acorn caps, or maybe some clue
to the struggle that lost one turkey
so many feathers by the path to Cedar Point.
Perhaps my boots smell, too, a little
like the nice meals Cathy valiantly cooked for us.
You may be thinking “No, it’s just the OFF
you sprayed on them, silly,” and that may be true,
except for the springiness they picked up
from soaking in hours of music and poetry
and pleasant company. But here’s
where words step back, and I am left
with image and sound and feeling – your faces
and expressions, specific little phrases,
voices speaking and singing, women dancing,
guitars, drums, piano and keyboard playing
melodies, cadences, grooves, harmonies:
memories that roll over the cells of me,
over one thousand miles away,
like a gentle river rolls
over its thousands of stones.