Words without a Song, and: Geometry

Words without a Song

A week after the killings, I settle into reading
an overview of the elegy. The long thin call

of birds in the background; that CD
where a man's voice interrupts to name

each feathery blue and gold composer as all
around the air waves shatter

with freshly arranged terms for war,
for retribution and for slaughter.

The sky holds above, earth below -
foiled, silent horizon.

And us trampling the middle air
where amaranth brighten in the rubble.

Better to go in sandals through the pines,
take birdsong by the spoonful

to mind.

Geometry

Stones from the Aegean scatter on my moonlit platter.
I water them to make the night glitter, fuchsia blowing,
the neighbor's cat on the porch dabbling
with his reflection.

          The world takes to color like sugar,
this, my paltry day-of-the-dead set out for drowned sailors -
limestone, agate and amber at rest
underwater.

      Each holds a swimmy mosaic
picked from the beach for its whimsy:
smudged sail on a Chinese junk,
while another curls whiteness to dark. Half and
half of the universe.

          So when the clink, clink
of cocktails begins at three in the morning,
half-asleep, I expect plum wine and laughter,
not the five coons I find groping
at water.

       The biggest looks my way then chunks
down to the deck one, two, three of his wish-fish
gone awry on a clear summer night.
Deep realm of indelible patterns,
where for a moment something old
flashed, then slipped through the fingers.