Sometimes Ana and Matt sit outside after dinner, sometimes in their little patio, other times under the trees around their house. Once a week or so, they take a walk. They don't live in a neighborhood proper, so they don't have neighbors to wave at and say hello to. Instead, they often cross the old highway in front of their house, through the fields on the other side, and walk along the banks of the Rio Grand, flowing slowly and silently to the south. They live on the eastern side of the river. The sun sets across the river. Often the sun setting into the clouds over the desert makes a gorgeous spectacle.
So it's no surprise Ana would like the poem "Scorcher," by George Bilgere, in which a couple take a walk in the evening. It's perfectly straightforward--there's nothing in it she had to ask Matt to help her understand. She knew about the sounds of crickets and katydids, and the little flashes of lightning bugs. The poem doesn't mention frogs plopping into the river or the puttering of a distant tractor which Ana enjoys, but it does mention greeting neighbors, which they almost never do. She misses that, from her childhood.
What she especially likes is the way the end of the poem sets the walkers' position in the context of the universe, on a "dark planet" on "one of the slender, gracefully swirling arms/of one of the smaller galaxies." She thinks about that often, more often than most of the rest of us. And why shouldn't she?
Another poem Ana likes that's set in the universe
There are many more poems Ana treasures in the table of contents on the right, about halfway down (under the Love sculpture).
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