The 17th. Sultry
Clouds, gray, massive, wooly.
…piled and piled
Like gathered-up forgetfulness.
-Wallace Stevens
But these are storm clouds
Comes, then, the rumbling, the distant violence, the electric…
The dog Cricket can hear it all, wherever.
Distance, fearful moments, are always always
near for her.
So good that she forgets it all when
it passes, or seems to.
Mere Dog moments
speak of no future but ashes
But right now, for her, it is
Like an Army approaching.
Trembling, a spotted study in pathos.
On goes the thunder shirt, a half tab of C.B.D.
is proffered, devoured.
hidden in peanut butter
It will not matter. Terror roams the tin house.
The jacket, the drug do nothing.
Sometimes you have to pass through fear
Mortal and mere dog.
Til there is only sun again, bright, drenching air.
And the human anxious hours go on, endless
not to be hidden
In peanut butter.
I write. I must write.
____________________________
The mocking birds and their babies are gone.
They were out my window.
They have twice built nests at the end of the carport.
In the flanking shrub and palm.
Three baby beaks, massed in fuzz, turned up, begging
A mother
Nurturning them in the spikey crest of the Robellini palm.
Odd place to build a nest, eye-level, thorny.
Then there was just one, so big, timid, flapping
Ready for the sky. The last baby.
Gone all at once. What is sadder? Death is what.
They will sing and soar their hour. Be glad of it.
May their song, theirs and their fellow mockers
tails bobbing be always about us.
But we wish we knew where they were now.
____________________________
That nest. The coiled twigs of abandonment, fragile to begin with
Unraveling. A wind might take it. Or time, which
will take us
And the nest will be gone.
Forever.
But there are always nests.
______________________________
I add seed to the old feeders.
I wonder, where human life in concerned, where — from here?
Where? When? Exile. Sub-tropic exile.
And the poet wrote that…
The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.
And he wrote: The palm stands at the edge of space
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
In the fronds.
In Mid-July
Or just past it,
on the 17th.
It didn’t rain.
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