Poetry Review, Winter 2019

When winter birds scatter at shadows,
cacophony delivers them again:

saltbush, the wind’s pickup lines.

The dead still aren’t talking:
father speechless

unlike a machined hummingbird.

The drone when space is a bullet
not a camera

calls wherever we go a postcard.

After our sister’s wedding
my drunk brother takes my arm

blind as a broken wing.

Dear Talon,
when a bird flies into the house

hold him.

Nothing consummates an idyll
like abandonment.

Zoom back. A marvel then,
to be here with you.
Nude like fruit, and motiveless.

The grey-leaved olive trees outside seem like
young women: small, light, exciting.

I love you, I wish there was some more
original way of saying it.

We drink our bitter coffees on the terrace.
And the little dark stone
of work that secures me, where is it?

Millions of hard stars flood the sky
each night, gentle wording
defending mystery.

My own timidity, pale as meal,
will turn out to hold some ruthlessness, too.

I draw a line down the middle
of my life—
that’s my night now, that’s my day.

Each day the sea is blue, then amber,
then burning red; it declares love, it takes it back.

Twilight, and the light follows the sound of a plane west.
The sound fades away, and the light fades after it.
It is pulled, unwilling to leave, and it turns while leaving.
All there is to hear is the water and the birds.

But the sound of the water is not the voice of the water only.
On the tongue of the water is also the voice of the culvert.
And the sound of the birds is not the sound of the birds only.
In the mouths of the birds is also the voice of the empty road.