“It’s a brutal world,”
says the hawk, who sees himself
as a realist.
“Everywhere I go, I see ruin,
hostility, violence.”
He shifts from one foot
to the other, spreads
his wide wings.
“I think this dove I’m eating
would have agreed.”
I feel certain we’ve done this before,
long ago, unrecalled motes,
ancient, disregarded
These charts we use,
these chants we sing,
no bearing, no azimuth,
no cardinal point,
no way to mark stopping or going
Time is not a river, but an
ocean of boundless currents
the sun wildly spinning,
having lost its nerve,
clouds collapsed into rain,
I hear a song in Arabic,
imagine Peter singing
an invitation to the souls
of the dead, collected, divine
Time beckons, strained through
graveyards, yawning tides
of will and desire, dried up
and blown away, like wisps,
uncertain
Just so, I think of the dead
in their boxes, waxed up,
locked away, waiting for
what? A second coming, a
U-turn from oblivion?
I think of Alcibiades, of Pushkin,
of Camus among the cannibals,
lost in the finding, buried under history
and me, a sentimental fool, adrift
What dreams fall breathless
what lives winched open
for the sake of notoriety.
Beneath the snow
lurks springtime,
patient
The moon hangs senseless,
its swells all aglow
contained in essences unguessed,
or unremembered.
The sun dies in front of our eyes,
its fires all but claimed,
mortgaged to the teeth,
unable further to dim.
The stars still hold their own, it seems.
Orion still hunts the bear,
faithful mutt dogging his footheels,
bow at the ready, at least until
one or another of its strings
explodes across the sky,
uncontrolled, reckless.
If there’s a lesson in it for us,
mudbound, entwined, encoiled
in rumored codes, blind to the stipulations
of our own existence,
it will be told too late,
our gasps of recognition
insufficient to sustain us.
Technically this is really more of a senryu. I won’t tell if you won’t.
We’re already 60% water
my body thinks
it’s quite enough
exiles child 