*Owl*
An owl lives downstairs and keeps us from going there.
We swaddle ourselves in any
kind of sheet or blanket we find.
We would in April
have good things to eat and a green
world beyond the pane.
We would in April get ready for May
and all the feathers
picked from the grass
and dead leaves on the ground
but we walked through the front door
and there the owl loomed and we were afraid,
we ran up the stairs.
The owl turned
his head and we could
see but not understand and he sounded just
like an owl and yellow eyes reflecting candlelight
turned to torches. We would but we now wish.
~*~
*White Herons: Nesting Pair*
Bodies white as brides, as a christening; necks snaked,
legs black and long,
scandalous as red stockings.
Lifting into the air, one flies northward; the other turns off
toward the dirty gray southeastern sky.
Living alone along an inland creek.
The pair eventually return to meet
here, newfound, good cover,
lots of branches and vines threading in and out of each other
over the thin run of water. A church away from pews
and kneeling masses.
Smoothed stones pile
and drift, reshaping the shore. A church
fogged in for the night, holy dead leaves curling,
shifting, and flaking apart, old paper, old tinder, temple floor.
The male, the female, a magnificent nest of found
travail, trailing detritus; a cavernous dish at the center to hold
the made and the mother.
Hope for the pure feathers,
the sculpted petal-white wading birds, museum-quality,
pillaged from dens of fallen warriors, emerged whole from
beams emanating and grasses bending and sleek hammered bands to be worn
about the neck, the arms, the wrists; jewel stock gems gleaming
through mist or through low green leaves, birds unlike birds,
full of flight, though heavy,
lifting again and again.
Scars the air, scars on the air.
Drawn in chalk and favoring the company of one another,
life-mates, birds like fading glyphs.
~*~
*Bedtime*
A guttering candle—
even glowing
in summery twilight
after a few hollow
gusts of wet air fill
and drain
the curtain forms—
magnifies the coming
dark and the coming hush
of swallow wings
folded as cloaks fold
over the heavy arms
of monks, penitent.
~*~
*Barn Swallow in Daylight*
Casually-held, cloak-like folded
wings, and
backed in the fathomless and clean
blue of velveteen
on which vendors place their faceted glass–
not blue of Mary, but blue
of a wide and dark night.
Large swallow eyes open and eternal:
the holes
in the sky,
the foci.
~*~
*Degree of Arc*
Color of porcelain. What right does day sky
have to warm me? I’d rather find
a dry leaf to bed down beneath.
There is so much blue. Opaque cycle (time before
shedding its skin, the snake),
blue orbits (eyes’ house), the snake a sky,
skin, thin layer milky over the eyes.
Opaque to bend, to break
the heart of a snake,
three-chambered–rooms divided, rooms under
muscle, locked. Rooms never walked
into, sat down in; rooms
enfolded by curtains looming
over wide windows overlooking
the long lawn of cropped grass, the small
and manicured yews
down the walk on the west side of the house.
Finding my body wandering
here, below compact white clouds,
below a blue smooth as rose petals,
as veinless. I delve a leaf from air. A perfect
one. Already, though the air is in Spring, what
I hold bears a winter gait and rhythm, long notes,
sheets and sheets of black icicle drops
coalescing: the torn
and dry cast holds its past
where cliff-face meets strand of white sand beach.
~*~