On Viscera, and: The Earth's Day, and: Seeing to Etiquette

On Viscera

A broken sestina

A chance look out the window,into a squall of white feathers—what kid shakes a pillow in our alley?I rise for a real lookinto the November gray to seea hawk clutching a pigeon in its beak.I slam open the window,but the hawk just staresinto the wind-blown featherstoward me in my bedroom,not a really safe place either, thentakes off for better purchaseto devour the meatin its claws and beak. Frozenat this window, I noticeon my sill a feather—a keepsake of the real,proof of a pain that is real,that mess of pigeonon street or branch. I don't wantto think about beaks. Orwindows or feathers that recollectan image of innards. Whowould want to reel at the sightof one's own bowels,brash red and bile?What infernal beak can breakthe brain's shuttered window to see —a mother and fatheron a pull-out feather bed,the wall too shaking—the entrails of the unconsciousas real as bark and branch, as greatas wings lifting, as sharp as beakwith an atrocity called supper?Through this outer-borough window

I am claws and beak and feathers.I am blunt window, realizingbranch as a root and grinning, What's shaking?

The Earth's Day

Grain and water keep us alive—like plants, we drink the sunlight—then, too, ballad and lullaby.With animals, really, coincident.

Plants sip up the sunlight.The clouds drink from rivers.With animals coincident,The rivers drink from storms.

The clouds drink from rivers again.The children, from their mamas.The rivers drink from storms and on.The mamas, from the stars.

The children drink mamas' milk.Mamas' milk is light and tempest.The mamas drink from the stars.The stars drink from where

Mamas' milk is light and tempestjust as grain and water keep us alive.The stars drink from wherewe drink from ballad and lullaby.

Seeing to Etiquette

The crabgrass and dandelions on the unmown lawnattract flocks of blackbirds and grackles and

they look like a neighborhood party,walking in a line, arm's-length apart, seeking evidence

except, of course, they're not overturning tufts of grassfor a shred of cloth or cigarette butt. I like the grass unmown.

I like that hopping about for no-see-ums. And nowthe flocks lift off, again not unlike neighbors done

looking for a lost girl. Lost, as in, we've lost her.As in, she's dead—though we dare not say the word, dead.

Hirschl said it's one of the few taboos left in America, death.To talk about it. And I see that. But today Nicole commented on

a bereavement note to Esther—maybe by way of remindingthat that's how things are seen to. Yes, they—the birds, that is—

take off in a single pall into the grove:I hear their squawks and see the elms shaking.

Shuddering like neighbors. I like proprieties. And next,I write a condolence to Nicole's father, Peter. I like blackbirds.