Perennials, and: Poem Beginning with a Line from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and: Starlings

Perennials

Let us praise the ghost gardensof Gary, Detroit, Toledo—abandoned

lots where perennials wakein competent dirt and frame the absence

of a house. You can hearthe sound of wind, which isn't

wind at all, but leaves touching.Wind itself can't speak. It needs another

to chime against, knock around.Again and again the wind finds its tongue,

but its tongue lives outsideof its rusted mouth. Forget the wind.

Let us instead praise meadow and ruin,weeds and wildflowers seeding

years later. Let us praise the girlwho lives in what they call

a transitional neighborhood—another way of saying not dead?

Or risen from it? Before runningfull speed through the sprinkler's arc,

she tells her mother, who kneelsin the garden: Pretend I'm racing

someone else. Pretend I'm winning.

Poem Beginning with a Line from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Just look—nothing but sincerityas far as the eye can see—the way the changed leaves,

flapping their yellow underbelliesin the wind, glitter. The treelooks sequined wherever

the sun touches. Does anyonenot see it? Driving by a fieldof spray-painted sheep, I think

the world is not all changed.The air still ruffles woolthe way a mother's hand

busies itself lovingly in the hairof her small boy. The sunlifts itself up, grows heavy

treading there, then lets itselfoff the hook. Just look at itleaving—the sky a tigereye

banded five kinds of goldand bronze—and the sequin treeshaking its spangles like a girl

on the high school drill team,nothing but sincerity. It glitterswhether we're looking or not.

Starlings

The starlings choose one piece of sky above the river       and pour themselves in. Like a thousand arrows              pointing in unison one way, then another. That bit of blue       doesn't belong to them, and they don't belong to the sky,or to the earth. Isn't that what you've been taught—nothing is ours?       Haven't you learned to keep the loosest possible hold?              The small portion of sky boils with birds.       Near the river's edge, one birch has a knot so muchlike an eye, you think it sees you. But of course it doesn't.