The Smallest of the Tiny
Your brown eyes and wisped tail
Make me want to believe,
To recognize divinity,
Sanctity in a moment of grace
Your presence on that branch, solidified
In the crinkled leaves and busy creek
In the smell of fresh water,
Metallic and mossy.
But I see things you do not
A rage against the dying
My plight and yours
And I want to scream to you and yours
The trees and milkweed
The spacious trellis of sediment catchers
Along the banks
The rocks: human-placed,
Reticent against the currents
That I have lost my faith in greater things
And put it in the smallest of the tiny
In the pool that holds two mallards
Looking out for each other,
Taking turns tucking their beaks,
Reconnoitering the rim, standing
On one webbed foot.
Your size, your chirp, your black cap
Your fee-bee-fee-bay,
Your stillness, your rootedness,
Your charity, your dive and return
Test my failing faith like humans
At the fourth wall, flailing, climbing,
Begging to get in.
I close my eyes and listen.
The Coats of the Imperials
TC Boyle says it’s too late.
I sing an apology to the blue bird
And the trinity in the domesticated
And the predicament of the wild,
If that word means anything anymore
The wild is dying
The domestic is dying
As are we humans
On our way to overheating
Overeating
Over living our boundaries
Bodily and otherwise.
But still he’s writing
And going on Bill Maher
So there must be some kind of hope,
a thing, a thing, a mighty thing
Singing in the last of us
To know lions
The last of us to ignore
The last call of a generation
Or four.
TC Boyle is with me
On this blunted mountain,
In this sixty degree day in February
On the road to discovery
In the museum of natural history
In the twisted wing of a blue heron
In the absence of that British soldier lichen,
Its crimson tips, the coats of the imperials,
I’ve been looking for these years now
But it’s unable to survive cities
This Cladonia Christatella
To the Turkey
I wish I could tell you the impact,
What you did to me that day
When you hung by your feet from
A thick branch, a bare forest,
Feathers flying from the struggle
A family of artists and teachers,
Jewish and living above
The father’s glass-blowing studio,
Compact and soda free
His beard, his hand, veiny and exact
The knife to your throat,
The jerking, the quieting, the stillness,
The blood on the ground, steaming.
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