the days i love aren't mine, though if i get inside one, i stay

What Isn’t Mine
—shibui

Near a house in the canyon
where the meadow dips
and open-range cattle
loiter on the road,
a sign insists
COWS NOT MINE.

We used to laugh
and start to name other things
not ours: the rock,
the bighorn sheep, the pines,
the river.

You are not mine,
though I bend my life
to you. Our daughters
are not mine, not ours,
not owned. The days I love
aren’t mine, though
if I get inside one, I stay.

Not mine the mountains
that shore my seeing,
their snow, the clouds
they catch and release.

When I was younger, drinking sky
without aftertaste, I thought,
“all of it—mine,”
and it was. All

my “borrowed view,”
the Japanese might say
in a language
with so many words
for beauty—one that’s full
of time.

by veronica patterson
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