A Crow Is Loud
“Accept for joy from these, my outstretched hands, / A little sunlight and a little honey”
–Osip Mandelstam
I don’t know what the crows were arguing over
so early this morning.
I understood only the loudness.
It must have had something to do with not-enough
or not-us—most arguments do.
A crow is loud and almost never lonely.
In this world where even enough
hurries too quickly into either too much or vanished,
I throw a little salt on their dark wings.
Circumscribed Hour
A circumscribed hour, a parapet nothing leans over or into.
The sky is above the trees, just as it should be.
Cherries ripen.
Gravity holds close its hatchlings.
Slaughter sleeps this one moment among its nightmares.
The dead forgive us. Even the future’s dead forgive us.
Where We Have Come To
At least five people were killed and another 25 were injured in a shooting late Saturday at an LGBTQ
nightclub in Colorado Springs … all in all, Thanksgiving week has seen 22 people killed and 44 injured.
—The Guardian, 11/20-23/2022
The quadruple homicide happened at a marijuana farm 1.5 M north of Lacey. Kingfisher Count,
Oklahoma. Victims all Chinese citizens. Suspect arrested in Miami Beach on 11-22-22.
—gunviolencearchive.org/incident/2464943
The bodies of the gunman and two victims were found in an employee break room, authorities said, and
another near the front of the store. Three died after being taken to nearby hospitals.
—New York Times, 11/23/22
What wall lay flowers to the foot of?
What ink color the words?
How living remember?
How carry its saying?
Those who have lain down
their names
are armless and handless.
This wet cheek,
whose?
Has it, where you are, been raining?
And what do you ask of us
now,
from where you are,
from where we have come to,
and is there still asking?
Trains Leave. Airplanes Leave.
Trains leave.
Airplanes leave.
Trotting and wagging dogs.
People leave, also.
One, another. You.
Today, tomorrow, don’t matter.
Days just keep departing.
And still the city is never empty.
Where was it I thought
away is?
Rummage every drawer,
you still won’t find it.
Extinction / Roget’s Thesaurus, 1925
Again, I lift the thesaurus.
Its cover still gone,
with half the several prefaces and introductions.
At the other end, the index after “unn.”
Dispensable does fine to describe it
if you don’t have unneeded—so long as
you still can think of “dispensable” on your own.
You can’t know which of your thoughts have gone missing.
You can’t know which of your beings.
The way a person missing
half their field of vision doesn’t know it’s not there.
A salt marsh vanished. A species of lily or beetle.
And still, in these foxed pages,
inconceivable, immeasurable, invisible,
are not non-existent, negligible, or nevertheless.
You don’t miss what’s missing.
You miss what’s become not here.
A volume that grows ever larger.
You wanted to be an accomplice.
Imputable, guilty as charged.
To have left ungloved a fingerprint on this world.
Numinous:
at its root, the act of nodding.
As if God’s inexhaustible alibi—Yes, I was here.
