- Rehearsal for Ending
Feathers—or birds, or leaves
fell slowly into the snowamong the dark thin hounds
and their hunters,obscuring the wet bark torsos
of the trees,larger
even than the black-cladskaters on celadon
ponds, grim as themorning sky
and melting as,seconds later,
snow—I'm sure—was floating up—flakes or white feathers
losing their scantgravity
as the ice began to burnalong the edges
and the drifts of tulleveiling the long grass— [End Page 73]
already slowed, elongated—tangled in muddy clouds of web
as Mahler appeared—I think it was Mahler
—or something had happened to the air,
echoing the distance among those sameincreasing shades of green, in notes
or in something that trembles—
something else, something far apart
as the roiling gray of a fishtail-braided cloud, years
and seconds laterin that pentimento of rain, grainy and darkand darkening the distances of greenwaters and murky fields
until it seems barely possible to make outthe few abandoned fishing boats
and almost impossible to tellwhether the two tall stalks
are cut-off sailsor the edges of self-pruning cottonwoods
that have grown, in confusing weathers,up through salt
and through the teal and emerald ofthe slippery reeds of shore toward the roiling gray corn
of the clouds in their horizontal twisting above shards of wallbelow. And then white moths, [End Page 74]
like motes, floating into the star-dark sky,just as after the box is opened and things fly out
some of them are still alive, and light,even as the sail-cloak darkens over the body
and the lover extends the fingers again toward the wound, and tries,and cannot stand. [End Page 75]
Sarah Maclay is the author of three books of poetry: Music for the Black Room (2011), The White Bride (2008), and Whore (2004). She teaches at Loyola Marymount University, in California.