Michael Wynn

Autumn at the Beach

On the horizon brown pelicans

glide inches

above the rise and fall

of glassy swells.

Ten thousand waves ago

we walked here.

You wore a red jacket.

We held hands.

We were young and talked

about death and travel.

Empire and want.

We grew old. In Rome

we stood at the Church of Recovered Souls

and read the marble

plaque by the door,

my turn today, yours tomorrow.

I remembered this beach.

These waves. 

The Farmer

Plowing in September
she scribes seventy acres—
straight lines spaced true. 

Thick dust engulfs her tractor.
It might be green.
Black fireworks—
crows fly through the ochre cloud. 

Weeks later, hoar frost
on the barbed wire fence.
Snow falls. Flakes
random as her childhood

land on the long-settled dust.
In a cold barn
she cleans her tractor.

Michael Wynn grew up in the Willamette Valley, graduated with a biology degree from Western Oregon University, and completed his neurology residency and stroke fellowship at Oregon Health and Sciences University. His poems have appeared in Akitsu Quarterly, The Cortland Review, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and Neurology, and he’s the author of the chapbook, Bodies of Evidence.  Wynn says he’s “fascinated by the randomness of nature and disease,” and he “finds poetry to be uniquely suited to expressing the interplay between loss and beauty, between what is and what humans want.”