Poetry

She kept putting off sending him the book,
then one afternoon she recognized 
the author walking up Fifth Avenue

One night, she turns the novel’s last page. This is all—
small house, plain street, some trees, sweet and irksome neighbors, dishes, bills, water leaks, 

Nervous, twigs split, become swallows, 
jeté the platinum poring chits

over horizon’s bistered tinge.
Is a murderer secreted in us all,

The girl seems to fly
the hawk above her, a kite of feathers

Two seats away, my father watched
the tenor study the world that rumbled
parallel to his window: crumbling

The woman saves every heart- or wing-
shaped rock she finds, studding the mountain 

To protect the instrument, she spent all night
gesturing at plates or nodding yes to the glass of white. 

That God first placed an angel
with a flaming sword to guard
Eden’s closed gates, that He gave us
signs to declare a different logic,

In that endless season of dead grass
and rotted pumpkins, I was a boy
who stood in a tree and named all the cows

Leroy, wisdom in a chuckle, 
            Gold chains drape around his neck—
                         High yellow on high yellow—