Our Habits Beginning Again
My oldest living brother a farmer; a writer, me;
my sister a banker; my youngest brother a nuclear bomber pilot;
our other two brothers long where
our parents have gone, we stare
at the dew-starred earth
we’ll soon become
and, though grown, wonder,
like errant planets or wandering asteroids
how much more mischief we dare.
Ralph Salisbury (1926-2017) grew up hunting and trapping, for meat and pelts, and laboring on a family farm which had no electricity or running water. He attended university on the GI Bill after WWII and retired as Professor Emeritus from the University of Oregon, Eugene, where he taught for 43 years. His prizewinning memoir, So Far, So Good (recipient of the 2012 Riverteeth Literary Non-Fiction Book Prize), his three books of fiction, and his eleven books of poems evoke his Cherokee-Shawnee-Irish-English-American heritage. Poems from his twelfth book, seeking a publisher, have appeared in Northwest Review, About Place, and elsewhere.
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