Robins Embody the Holly
From crotched, zealous
emerald shields
comes this pealing, vernal throstle,
off-season in barbed hotel,
a chromic quire. Much is lost
on me, but loss is not.
Night’s tumbler, verdigris,
drops fast on day’s debris.
I swallow.
No surrogate for divinity, I know,
yet an earful of spring wine reams
grief: not mere mimicry. Not mine.
Cedar
With sight aborted would I be
you, bloodstone chamber
beside the lost-to-me river?
You be my business?
Not these words that return you
only in dreams
exceptionally blue,
you long ago stumped
in moonlight unforgiving
as the mirror that winks
when I cross the milky way
of its bedroom eye,
effaced as the stars,
the cars, bridge lights
across adult waters
the girl I was watched
behind your animal torso,
pheasant blooded, jar-filled cellar,
age-veined palm absorbed,
raised in ravaged opening,
an iris, a warning.
Pinecone
Have you a mind,
musty sweater,
close-closeted, dusk scaled,
messages sealed with resin,
your close-napped,
rachis of sorrow inflated
into fable, which is perhaps
any body’s story to tell?
You be winter’s.
I’ll be all that breath
it took to un-tell you
from the mute green branch.
Heron Madrigal
From pond’s blonde haunches
this blue deck-chair of a bird,
all canvas, struts, unfolds
& lifts above the adjacent lot,
as though the future might love us,
after all, despite our ungainly pride
& chop-block capacity for denial.
Undulant, its shadow, cast, moves
over windshield, moon-roofs:
a hobbled crate, a sunburnt kite
my watching heart pumps harder
to propel, as though attempting
a pastoral, out of tune & time & synch.
Ink, paper, whispering extinct, extinct.
