Ars Poetica: A Fly

lands on my leg. I did not even notice
it is so light, and then I flick it
away with the horse-tail-brush of my hand.

They do not bite. I do not know why they like to land.
Some science I have forgotten. Scent or sweat?

I lift my head to hear fluttering and squawks. A Jay has stolen a nestling
and the robin's frantic follow, dive, and peck.

My little fly will not depart. I tell him I am no fool.
You would love me more if I were dead.

Was it Hikmet who wrote of the fly who witnessed him
in his cell, who landed on the page as he wrote?

The wind stills. The oak leaves hush. The birds are quiet now.
For the smallest griefs are rarely sung.

But then the trees shiver. Every bird all at once. I was wrong.
More than ever, in a time of terror, there must be singing.

Ars Poetica (Mercy)

I said throw it all away, burn the page.
But then I saw a blue heron rise,
there over the bay, and two white boys beatboxing
on the pier, and the citrine light
on the boats, and the old Cambodian men casting their lines
out onto the water, and smoking cigarettes,
and their white buckets full of perch and crappies
and their children yelling up and down the pier
and young couples, hand in hand as they’ve been
since love was first invented in New Orleans, and the dusk
fell and the light changed to blush, then candy
then garnet, then it was dark. The men put away
their poles, their cigarettes like fireflies
bopped as they walked past the docks,
and I stood there in the blue dark
of the bay and the lights on the last boats
trawling in from the lake, and the lights
from the great freighter docked for repair
till I was the last one left, alone me and the moon,
my old friend and what was there to mourn
I say, what self-pity could I claim, but mercy.

Caesura

Deep inside my chest,
there is a wind named longing.
An old ache that runs
the hollow of my body:
thin reed you whistled right through—