Evening Concert

The crows still sing to remind us
of time half spent amid half-pleasures.
They sing to tell us we have become twilight
omens and pincushions. You
can scarcely breathe, they sing. Yet you are
as sensitive now to our music as ever,
the way it can seem to forge your life
into talons of grief, striking at maggots
just to make yourself happy.
What if we were to sing
a song so dense and unbraided,
so debonair and dark
that it seems to be like an eddy of
raindrops pooled into puddles,
not lost flowers left floating in the pond?

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On being the Tortoise in the Race

She knew the river was far too beautiful
for her to swim in even before she started the race.
The sun, it seemed, had changed the rain to steam.
It was like a leaf as it prepares to die.
How it turns color so beautifully, how it strains
not only eyes, but lips and liver, taste and smell.
Behind her, Achilles again narrows her lead by half. A well
of reflections appears, as does the tortoise. Her demise
is certain now as she moves through the woods,
as much a river as the river itself, so slow, meandering
in the way all ancient creatures move in that final landscape.
It’s time for her to be a part of the nocturnal peace
promised so long ago, for the tortoise feels fertile now
as she enters the deep water. She feels free.

If only she were a turtle…

Evening’s Everything

Each baby glows. Wings unfurled,
they spring from a crease of clouds.
They can’t know what it’s like to see
them flying overhead, to see
their diapers peel away, their bodies
so hairless: to see so much energy,
so concentrated in what are,
after all, immature muscles.
Yet they move more like falcons than kites.
To be what must be a fractal of yourself
as it forms amid the clouds: to feel
in each beat a wing of your own expansion:
to be produced from clouds every evening…
all sweetmeats, incense, gold leaf, everything.