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Trust

By Susan Kinsolving Susan Kinsolving

Trust that there is a tiger, muscular

Tasmanian, and sly, which has never been

seen and never will be seen by any human

eye. Trust that thirty thousand sword-

fish will never near a ship, that far

from cameras or cars elephant herds live

long elephant lives. Believe that bees

by the billions find unidentified flowers

on unmapped marshes and mountains. Safe

in caves of contentment, bears sleep.

Through vast canyons, horses run while slowly

snakes stretch beyond their skins in the sun.

I must trust all this to be true, though

the few birds at my feeder watch the window

with small flutters of fear, so like my own.

Source: Poetry (May 2003).

Biography

Born in Elmhurst, Illinois, poet Susan Kinsolving earned a BA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts.

Kinsolving’s poetry uses dark humor, rhyme, and received form to explore loss, family, ephemera, and the natural world. In the New York Times, poet Carol Muske-Dukes praised its “powerful and practiced repertory of formal gestures, including a startling backhand of wit and . . .

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