Missing, and: Life in This Body, and: Wanting the Moon

Missing

All afternoon the SWAT teams have searched the marsh,rifles out, for the kidnapper that the girl,found wandering here, has said still roams,and now, at dusk, a helicopter hovers in the distance,heat-sensing cameras reading the faint glowof cattail roots, muskrat blips, and the wild skyline arcsand curlicues that are the male woodcock courting-dance that Joyce, my birdwatching friend, has come to see,walking the bike trail, binoculars ready, listening forthe peent, peent call, the burst of aerial display, one eyeon the helicopter, a giant dragonfly, coming nowto hover above her-and Joyce assesses the risks: the kidnapper?He's not harmed the girl, and what would he want with her?The SWAT teams? Far in the distance, with the TV cameras.The helicopter? Reading her, perhaps, in the open field.And my friend walks out of the abduction storyinto the woodcock's life, its few brief nightsof flight that most of us have never seen. Later we learnthe missing girl has made it up, bought the ropeand knife and duct tape herself, something brokenin her wishing, something not fixed by roaming the marshat dusk, hearing the woodcock's whistling wings.

Life in This Body

And those other images of the brain lit up-faces here, hand tools there, words heard,words said, maps of the body, feet next to sex,happiness glowing in the left frontal cortex,grief with no words in the right, fear brightin the amygdala, self here, consciousnessof self there, and mirrors of your mouth, hands,movements everywhere, intention a latecomer-what is it to live in this body, these bones,the world entering in a river of light and sound,smell of cut grass, gravity's tug?

Now the indigo buntingsare singing insistently in the walnut tree,their flashes of metallic blue a colorthat was never sky, and wild phlox the shadeof rainy cloud are releasing a perfumethat makes the bumblebees wild. Windgusts the daisy patch and green rises upon a great scaffold of branchesinto the building thunderheads.

All that pours in,first spatter of rain, sound of your voice,this inner life that is a singing underground-who can point to bone or brain and say-there's the river running through?

Wanting the Moon

Mother gone to dust, some    flower bed where        impatiens brightly bloom,

Father an ash sunk    through the waves,        water in your bones-

What story of loss    am I inventing        in this perishable world?

Both of you woven    in the fabric        of my every cell,

Irritable argument and soup    simmering on the stove,        love dining at the table,

Small birds waiting    for handouts as you       disappear into the new-

Every morning will wake to hunger.    Every evening will close its wings, fed,        whether the moon is dark or full.