Poems

On straitened wings

In the press of pushing arms and pushing legs
that burst up from the water, their whole faces

gasping for air, those same bodies abandon the
diagonals of mauve and purple defined by strict

white lines that curve between the torsos clad
in red that press as a hillside of trees weighed

down with rain, and birds float between the
trees on straitened wings, and the traces that

have waited at the twig ends in March are budding
slowly on the trees that stood there last year,

winter air over granite walls, dark and mossy,
beyond which rooks have landed and bounced,

as flowers gasp for air among the mourners
and the flowers by gravestones rot in cellophane.


The choices and the temporary
...