"Lost" by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

"Lost" by David Wagoner from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. © University of Illinois Press, 1999.

"Loons Mating" by David Wagoner

Their necks and their dark heads lifted into a dawn

Blurred smooth by mist, the loons

Beside each other are swimming slowly

In charmed circles, their bodies stretched under water

Through ripples quivering and sweeping apart

The gray sky now held close by the lake's mercurial threshold

Whose face and underface they share

In wheeling and diving tandem, rising together

To swell their breasts like swans, to go breasting forward

With beaks turned down and in, near shore,

Out of sight behind a windbreak of birch and alder,

And now the haunted uprisen wailing call,

And again, and now the beautiful sane laughter.

"Loons Mating" by David Wagoner from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems.

© University of Illinois Press.