Three Anima/l Songs

Of Time and the Octopus

Between the hills of war and troughs of want,
when we catch breaths along the spotty slope
of time, our eyes imprint the puffed and gaunt
presences who punctuate their scope,
almost to make flesh of the wind that moves
from ground to grass and child and to turn stone
the river carrying old bones to groves
marine and strange where the sun’s lees have gone.

There a great octopus sits looping out
her eight mind-legs and drinking in the sea
and its once-settled sediment. No doubt
disrupts the coming turn the waves foresee
when, limbs drawn tight, every pretended pawn
and knight on seabed ebbs as she darts on.

Bethesda: Early Run

It is the time of rabbits and the fox.
It is the hour of morning-star and dawn.
Households asleep through these suburban blocks,
here is the stage for mother and her fawn.
Here lies the threshold of the day, where flocks
of sparrows cluster on the corner lawn.
Soon is the ending of the night. The clocks
have not yet rung. The spell is not quite gone.

One human is a stranger in this land,
fugitive from a zone of trade and courts.
Two squirrels interrupted in their play
inspect me, as if they would understand
what trouble turned my realm so out of sorts
that I must run, as if to run away.

Hermes of the Worms

On a dead branch atop a massive oak,
a crow is perched. Yet it is not because
the crow betokens death—nor, at the stroke
of sunset, that it lets out cryptic caws
as signs drawn from the shadows—that the bird
has come to rest on that gray bough. The limb
is high, and, lacking leaves, it is preferred
for the wide field of vision offered him—
to scan for quarry to be borne below,
to live among the dead. It’s time to go.