Practical Water

Partita for Sparrows

P A R T I TA F O R S P A R R O W S We bury the sparrows of Europe with found instruments, their breasts light as an ounce of tea where we had seen them o‡ the path, their twin speeds of shyness & notched wings near the pawnbroker’s house by the canal, in average neighborhoods of the resisters, or in markets of princely delphinium & flax, flying from awnings at unmarked rates to fetch crumbs from our table half-spinning back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs we would descend much later; in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters where streets were taken one by one, where consciousness is a stair or path, we mark their domains with notched sticks of hickory or chestnut or ash because our cities of princely pallor should not have unmarked graves. Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge to which patterned being is parallel: they came as if from the margins of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning our little hourglass up on the screen. 3 ...