Bird
Tired, chest out,
she will not leave this morning,
a blue fall day among the rainy ones.
Maybe she will make it beyond this window
this evening
to a pile of damp rust leaves
or the paler ones
that cling to the trees
in conscientious blushes and defiant greens.
Squatting, forehead to pane,
the wind doesn’t ruffle her cheeks.
The smell of coffee, made by someone else,
lingers at her knees,
not the smell of raw wood,
not the smell of soaked birch and elm.
The stars may come out
while she still leans on the sill.
Her chest will be warm,
but no taste of the wind,
no sound of the night
will surround her,
no branches, clouds, leaves to gaze up to,
her head tilted away from this life.
To the Stranger of the Lost Address
The arms of Yucca sew the earth to sky,
buttoning desert blue to yellow scrub,
dead Cactus’s Bloom reflecting nimbus curves.
Some hand had dropped these boulders we uncurl
our bodies over, their chipped pebbles denting
the palms we press with little stories.
Face to dusk, it’s hard seeing lines,
like the profile of no stop between the living
and dying desert scene. Like etching plates,
bumps raise and redden the skin of our hands
over pressed white valleys, themselves rifting
over fortune lines. Why does it trouble us,
you ask, when there seems to be nothing left to say,
that earth creates a beauty humans can’t?
