Poet Laureate

In the Other

Say this sleepy yellow

baying its way into the cedar

green with the rain’s return

is my mother.

Say this early nod

the larch

lightening

is my brother.

Say the long ponderosa

needles gathered in the trail

are an ancestor, a warmth

of something stringing us

backward and forward in time.

This is how it seems to me now, 

something happens when the trail cuts up 

the open meadow and into the draw

where the water collects along the rocky tumble

where we always pause

where I can still see my mother

snow coming down on her hair.

There were no instructions for taking up the other as our own.

So we take the fire road, 

you sit in the puddles

thick with mud.

We walk it at twilight,

at sunrise, in the balmy afternoons, 

in winter,

ice slipping in the shallows. 

I say what is happening now 

is happening only because we have stayed. 

Here at the swollen other,

to make art is to try ourselves on in so many varieties.

The park catches us in all light. 

How open space seeks us out.

Say this open palm is the field that holds

the sun-filled faces of teenagers playing

roundnet, 

or ice skaters crinkling the air,

the generator drumming.

We let the dog chase her ball even though we aren’t supposed to

the field so big a mass happens in the middle and the vastness

swallows the priest’s prayer.

This open palm holds our lawn chairs and a picnic.

I love the mothers clumped in the shade surrounding the playground

and the young people sitting on the slope

behind the library writing, reading, looking in.

My son, fascinated, watches the herd of boys playing

basketball, their teenage bodies strategic in the dusk, the ball

a measure of time he bounces again and again in the backyard

open space pooling in our small spaces. The walk to the park

a routine of expectation that when we arrive

we won’t be alone. 

Jennifer Passaro, Coeur d’Alene Poet Laureate

22 October 2025, Coeur d'Alene Arts Awards