A Black Plastic Bag Is Rising

on the wind, like a raven
riding an updraft,
a wingless bird
without hope
of ever gliding
its way back down.

It billows and swells,
now round as a fist
raised at the heavens,
then thinly, it twists
and changes shape,
becomes a moth unfurling
from the chrysalis.

And this makes me ponder
the dark smudge of the soul
as it leaves the body,
released all at once from gravity.

But this is the opposite of a soul—
a polymer stretched and shaped
for single use, and then turned into refuse,
bearing our fingerprints into the world,
our carrying urge made
manifest, run amok,
an indestructible
piece of flotsam.
They’re everywhere.

I look out my window,
and see a land-locked jellyfish
wending its way through the city,
harpy, black spot, blight,
omen, burning tire, bit of midnight,
flake of ash from a funeral pyre.

One of millions.
And where, oh where will it light?

City Just Before Dusk

In the turning down of the day
the light folds
like clean white sheets,
then drapes in swathes across
whole groups of buildings,

so great sections of city glow,
bright as a Pre-Raphaelite angel’s face
as he announces another
coming of twilight.

Then stringy clouds,
that pull everything horizontal, fill the sky,
as if the atmosphere’s lying down
having just been roused
from a lengthy nap,

so whole neighborhoods slow
and drowse in half tones of charcoal blue,
as Vincent’s views of rain, through
the window of a Saint Rémy asylum, do.

In all of this we see night awakening
like the baby newly baptized,
and called for the first time by name.
Close by, his parents watch him
wriggle in the arms of the priest,
both their hearts aflame.

First The Heart Goes

then the head.
That's how it was
with the ruffed grouse
you found in the backyard,
knocked out of the sky,
windfall for some nighthawk.

(And isn’t that just how it was
with your grandmother?
Knocked out of life
by too much,
loss and sorrow?)

Of course, you went out to look,
filled as you are with reverence
for such beauty, the kind
that never lets you close enough
to see more than a quiver and blur.

(Wasn’t she like that too—
quicksilver; couldn’t sit still?)

And it took one day
for its chest to be emptied
hollow and dry as a cave;
the tribe that once lived there
long gone, feathers blowing.

(Her heart, torn into pieces,
first by losing two husbands,
then when your mother died.
When they had to take her car away
she told you her chest felt deserted;
cavernous as an empty house.)

And just one more day
for the body to abruptly stop at the neck,
mindless as you are right now,
lured by the long tail feathers, the golden ruffs,
bent over this bloodless thing,
to pull them out, so easily,

(It got to where she couldn’t stop
crying, began to burn
her dinners, forgot how to take her pills.)

Listen to you: making tiny crow sounds,
as you spread desire’s shadow
on the relics of a radiance you yearn for,
until it’s over and you’re ready
to toss the leavings to the clean-up crew in the woods.

(So little left, by the time she died in the nursing home.
Just the scalloped golden wedding band,
that fits on the end of your pinky,
and a little pile of pictures,
you keep in a drawer by your bed.)

Heart of Washington Square

When the birds fall
out of the trees behind you,
light as a cloud, when they lift in an arc,
wheel and bank right over the man you love,
as he stubbornly sits on a bench in the sun,
reading his book, while you hunch on another one
in the shade, preferring to take
the dimmer view, until those tiny wings
take flight, and your spirits rise up when they do,
as you will soon, conceding to a clearly cosmic
connection, the sparrows, their sheer velocity,
like Cupid’s arrows shot between you,
affirming that incongruous as the two of you
may be: red dwarf, white giant, ashiver, ablaze,
written by light, gently bathed in ink,
you’re part of the same constellation, linked.