the birds
skim the field, then rise
to the trees: that one,
now that one—
dozens of them
dipping and cutting
in Romantic abandon,
such flawless
precision!—
(Let’s remember:
this is how they feed—)
THE FIRST YEAR
1
The new parents rose
to throw stone after stone
into the pond. The moonlight
barely touched them.
The surface erupted with sound
every time it was breached.
All those stones planted
in that pressurized dark
at the bottom of the pond,
the temperature dropping,
the water beginning to ice.
When the first stone hit
and didn’t sink
they stopped their throwing
to observe the stone
still with them in the silent air.
2
Meanwhile, indiscernibly,
the water was draining
through a buried system
of pipes. They tossed their stones
onto the ice; each skittered
to an unreachable place.
That long winter,
the ice covered with stones
kept lowering—until at last
it rested on the mud
and the stones they’d thrown
those months ago. Then
the sun began to rise,
and the ice began to melt,
and it was spring.
INSIDE THE BOOK
For my daughter: these images,
these trenches of script. She keeps
reaching to pull them
from the page, as if the book
were an opened cabinet;
every time, the page
blocks her hand. They’re right
there—those pictures
vivid as stained glass,
those tiny, inscrutable knots.
They hang in that space
where a world was built
in fits and erasures—she wants
to lift that world
into her own.
Meanwhile, this world
floods her thoughts,
her voice; it fills
the windows, the streets
she moves through;
it reaches into her
as the air reaches into her lungs.
Then, before we know it,
here she is with us
inside the book.
THE PEOPLE’S HISTORY
The People moved up the street in a long column—
like a machine boring a tunnel. They sang
the People’s songs, they chanted the People’s slogans:
We are the People, not the engines of the city;
we, the People, will not be denied.
Then the People
descended upon the People, swinging hardwood batons
heavy with the weight of the People’s intent.
And the People surged, then, into the rows before them,
pushing the People against the blurred arcs
of truncheons, the People throwing rocks
into the plastic shields and visors,
behind which
the People blinked when the rocks hit, then pushed back
so the mass of People before them compressed.
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