Saturday's Poem: What Isn't Mine

What Isn't Mine by Veronica Patterson

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.

(from Thresh and Hold: Poems by Veronica Patterson, Big Pencil Press, 2009)