canted open the creaking garage door
and tossed him back to blinding summer life.
He spiraled into brilliance, out of sight.
When Michelangelo struck Moses’ knee
and shouted at him, “Speak!,” the chisel made
a dent. But Moses kept his glaring silence.
And yet, through the statue’s marble hair, a wildness
stuck out two ridged horns and spoke.
“Let this be light,” it said. “Let this be light.”
Cul-de-Sac Idyll
The flycatcher feeds its young a lightning bug, frantically blinking.
The trees forget the hurricane as they stand still for days.
The defibrillator sleeps in a lump under our neighbor’s shirt pocket.
The flycatcher snagging its prey squirms like a trout in midair.
The dogwoods this spring blew all their savings on taffeta.
The cardiac muscle fibers shudder like untimed pistons.
The flycatcher’s beak is a leggy mouthful of bent pins.
The poplars go first, brown-bagging their leaves, one by one.
One false move and the defibrillator kicks like a hoof.
There are words that stop and start sunlight, moonlight, and starlight,
verbs like the motion of thought, nouns like dreams and daydreams,
and the end of the world, and the end of the end, right here.
Bat
I remember the Sierra pond
where at evening bats went dipping,
pilgrims with sharp chins dipping
to holy water, preying
on mosquitoes as if praying.
I watched them envying their purpose,
wanting at twenty some purpose.
Snap the hatchling as it rises,
skim the darkness as it rises.
I wanted that perfected arc,
hunting life along an arc,
both creature and creator.
What is it now about the creature
appearing at a sudden angle,
wavering through dusk, angel
of hunger at the night’s rim,
like a card flicked at a hat brim?
Now I read it like an icon
blinking on a screen and ken
something there that’s meaningful,
a little void that’s never full.
Catch and Release
By the scientist’s front door
an azalea, memento
of a term in college catching
field mice under redwoods among
azaleas, to study traits
of families, their range among
azaleas. Now she has one
flowering yearly by her front door.
Pressure of the lab, of funding
overheads and uncommitted
assistants, yet the azalea
greets her every day, a memory
tangled in it like cobweb mist
of doing a simple task
repeatedly, under the redwoods
with the Havahart traps, then in
the clean lit lab. Simplicity,
youth, one or two obligations,
their emblem the azalea.
And the release, gray and silver
quickness in the undergrowth,
to hunting, breeding, hunger—
the speed of life.
Eocene Beech Leaf
This ghost filled in with stone for flesh,
with spine and delicate ribs legible
and a fragment of the fragile blade chipped off,
this leaf imprinted on a page of shale,
all the more tender for its injury,
for forty million years has held its place.
Startling in a way to see so far back—
as if we’d found between leaves of a book
a picture of ourselves from much younger days
and remembered nearly everything about it
except just why we’d put it there.
Then Saw the Problem
How do you turn into a flower of the field,
the lily clothed to make Solomon rue his glory?
What leap takes off from here towards evolution,
pointing the way to the pearly everlasting?
Eons made the flower and flowers have their agendas,
whatever the population of the field—
more than a lifetime to construct that airport.
The Kestrel
While she spoke I saw another
