Sparrow Songs

1.  Compass

Sparrows are endowed with grains

of some magnetic ore

stuck between their beaks and brains

to tell them where they are.

But I was born without this trait;

my pocket-skull is hollow.

To stay alive, I have to wait

for someone else to follow.

2.  Bloods

On a trellised balcony

I met a lonely dove.

I spoke to her of alchemy,

the highest form of love.

A sparrow quipped that we should try

to mix our spectral bloods.

You'll birth a human butterfly

among the jasmine buds.

3.  Trickster

He acts as though his heart has split

and plummets in mid-flight

then yanks himself up like a puppet,

shrieking with delight.

They humored his dramatic ploys

back when he was a fledgling,

but wished he knew the whole flock's joys

hang from a single heartstring.

4.  Traveling Glove

I wonder where the fingers went,

the warmth that you discarded.

My lover kept me in a splint,

immobile, brokenhearted.

You cut the fingers from the glove,

exposed the troubled wrist.

Many things I used to love

continue to exist.

Note on the Back of a Postcard

You know the dinghy that we used to row
to the thicket islands just offshore?
A buoyant plywood box, and little more - 
it vanished in a gale some years ago,
left its towline dangling from the pier
like a torpid stem and fraying root.
I felt its loss, like yours, was absolute.

You see the picture on the postcard here?
It's the selfsame boat, as you can tell,
which some photographer must have found
wrenched upon a rocky spit of ground.
I thought of you, and hoped you're doing well.

Printmaker

In kindergarten I was also a printmaker;
I worked in potato, picnic knife,

and tempera.  My oeuvre was a crude star
cut in terrestrial root.  Thumping

a construction-black sky with it
I cobbled a universe together:

orbits came from spinning the stamp
and I grasped gravity firmly

enough to cluster - though I felt nothing
should overlap.  Still somehow

the blue crept into the white,
and I printed a field of star-shaped earths.

     

1066

It discovered a route
to my eye:
             Guillaume le Conquerat's arrow,
tipped with tea-tree and aloe
and arrowroot.

I was crying.  The troop
clotted a throng 
                        around my pupil
as though the long
              stalk and fletch were a flagpole.

It stung my brain like soap.

In the eye, in the eye, in the eye
the soldiers lamented

but my olfactory bulb
               fluttered like a sex organ, the scented,
sanded pine-tar air
                                             sweetening the tacky war
               that bark not native to Normandy,

and the knot of my gaze pumping
                            raspberry syrup

as I scoured my face
                 and stepped into my stirrup.