I reflect critically.
Is this skill crucial?
Do you think?

Ballerinas are robust.
Are your toes calloused?
Do you dance?

***** lips that've been caressed,
This is your Sunday best

tattered denim, ***** plaid;
This is his Sunday best

too-short of a sundress hanging on an inked shoulder,
This is her Sunday best

sobbing, screaming, squirrelly;
This is their Sunday best

tear-stained eyes and a wrinkled blouse;
This is my Sunday best

Starbucks cups of Kenya (fair trade)
Academic palaver and ennui
Interrupted by a hovering sparrow
Just outside our glassy corner
“Sparrows can’t hover”
An ornithologist told his class twenty years ago…
And here’s this sparrow,
Uneducated, I guess…
Hovers above and between us
On the other side of the glass…
Just hangs there
Maintaining for a count
One, two, three, four…
Slips down and then back up
And toward us, just above the glass,
Neatly picks a moth from the brick casing.
The helo-sparrow descends
To consume the pinched moth,
Its dusty wings
Resembling sunflower hulls
Shucked and discarded
Near bleachers after the game.

A hopeful romantic whistles
His two note call
Outside my window,
Down toward the open pond
Flaunting winter-killed carp.

A raucous crow caws
Derision in black and naked trees
Though in the stillness
And the damp of spring,
His mindless clamor
Doesn't mean a thing.

The chickadee knows only life,
Anticipates the nest to come,
Sings a two-toned song
And beckons to his mate,
For which, libidinous, he
The air with amor fills.

I never wished for my feathers
To catch fire
Unsure of who made me
This way

Losing my brilliance was never
My desire
My finale was
Excruciating

Someone once told me
That fire heals wounds
"To cauterize is to
Stop the bleeding"

This new discovery
Completely consumed.
Becoming anew
Was intriguing

The time then came
For the heat and the haze
These moments both petrifying  
And exhilarating

I touched the dark
Before I embarked
Forming from embers while I
Remembered

I am reborn

It was getting late in the year,
the sky had been low and overcast for days,
and I was drinking tea in a glassy room
with a woman without children,
a gate through which no one had entered the world.

She was turning the pages of an expensive book
on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea,
a book of colorful paintings—
a landscape, a portrait, a still life,
a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table.

Men had entered there but no girl or boy
had come out, I was thinking oddly
as she stopped at a page of clouds
aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold.
This one is my favorite, she said,

even though it was only a detail, a corner
of a larger painting which she had never seen.
Nor did she want to see the countryside below
or the portrayal of some myth
in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete.

This was enough, this fraction of the whole,
just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough
now that the light was growing dim,
as was she enough, perfectly by herself
in her place in the enormous mural of the world.