The Air

What is this dark and silent caravan
that being nowhere, neither comes nor goes;
that being never, has no hour or span;
of which we can say only that it flows?
How was it that this empty datastream,
this cache of dead light could so lose its way
it wandered back to feed on its own dream?
How did that dream grow to the waking day?
What is the sound that fades up from the hiss,
like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing,
now full of its only note, its lonely call,
drawing on its song to keep it singing?
When will the air stop breathing? Will it all
come to nothing, if nothing came to this?

Animal Graves

The mower flipped it belly up,

a baby garter less than a foot long,

dull green with a single sharp

stripe of pale manila down its back,

same color as the underside

which was cut in two places,

a loop of intestine poking out.

It wouldn't live,

so I ran the blades over it again,

and cut it again but didn’t kill it,

and again and then again,

a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke

on me like a swarm of bees.

It took so long

my mind had time to spiral

back to the graveyard

I tended as a child

for the dead ones, wild and tame:

fish from the bubbling green aquarium,

squirrels from the road,

the bluejay stalked to a raucous death

by Cicero the patient, the tireless hunter,

who himself was laid to rest

one August afternoon

under a rock painted gray, his color,

with a white splash for his white splash.

Once in the woods I found the skeleton

of a deer laid out like a diagram,

long spine curved like a necklace of crude, ochre spools

with the string rotted away,

and the dull metal shaft of the arrow

lying where it must have pierced

not the heart, not the head,

but the underbelly, the soft part

where the sex once was.

I carried home the skull

with its nubs of not-yet-horns

which the mice had overlooked,

and set it on a rock

in my kingdom of the dead.

Before I chopped the little snake

to bits of raw mosaic,

it drew itself

into an upward-straining coil,

head weaving, mouth open,

hissing at the noise that hurt it.

The stripe was made

of tiny paper diamonds,

sharp-edged but insubstantial,

like an x-ray of the spine

or the ghost beginning to pull away.

What taught the snake to make itself

seem bigger than it was,

to spend those last few seconds

dancing in the roar

and shadow of its death?

Now I see, though none exists,

its grave:

harebells withered in a jar,

a yellow spiral

painted on a green-black stone,

a ring of upright pine cones for a fence.

That’s how the deer skull lay in state

until one of the neighborhood dogs

came to claim it,

and carried it off to bury

in the larger graveyard of the world.