On the Orchard’s Edge

I search for something, a glimpse

            like a tulip red will-o-wisp,

that has just been found. On the dry

floor ofapple leaves, his breast leaps out

like a salmon climbing rapids, tiny feet

clench an invisible branch, stained

glass eyesare now broken.

As I bow, handscupped, to lift

the light body, dark snakes slide

throughthe grass, tasting the rosy scent

of death, and glide toward the living bird

that is my hand. I flutter

thebroken wings of my fingers and watch,

with chickadee and grackle alike,

as my grosbeak enters the unhinged chapel

ofsnake’s fragile jaw. I feel the terrible

way in which the gray grass slowly

unbends and the black ribbons twist

upon myhand, numb between the leaves. 

I feel thebreached blood from my wrist

drain into the bird and the muted

chorus oflife in the thirsty air. 

And somewherefarther back, a low

and empty song—the widowed mate,

my otherdesolate hand.

Her Mission of Light

Seven months after the death ofmy mother,
the corpulent C-130s circling the air base

remindme how, when she was nine,
the Swedish girl they called matchsticklegs

(who could sprint the sandy length
of seaside lane in record time) first heard

andthen saw the Nazi bombers
in their razor-tight formations scraping

the lowchin of the horizon, en route
to Norway and dark England beyond.

She too passed like a recondite
mission, whispering from 17,000 feet,

a near-anonymousentry into the endless log
of the world’s migrations. Sixty-one years

later, Itake the vacant road past
the base’s back gate, along the brilliantly

destructiverows of F-4s and A-10s,
with their own secret missions to

Vietnam and Bosnia and Iraq,places
she could have lived in her 1950s

migrationto America—places like the vast
and abundant plains of Rhodesia or

thegolden avenues of Naples and Rome.
The street here is not glowing, nor

full oflife. But it leads to the blue
hills beyond the river, and from there

the scarletcliffs of the Santa Catalinas—
and sometimes, as now, the light off a curving

wingcatches and holds the mountains and clouds
and, higher still, a vapor trail to the heavens.

The Last Harvest

She was taught that riversystems

treebranches & veins are all mathematically

equivalent  That a skein of geese

isdirected by the electromagnetic pull

of ironwithin the earth’s core

That the brilliant wash of asunset &

theenlargement of the harvest moon are due

simplyto condensed particulates

in theatmosphere  She was taught this

& believedit but wanted to learn further

why thegeese shining in flight like a string

ofpearls know the line of Old Hansen’s

ranchthe harvest moon lies swollen

againstthe starless sky & the dying

sunflares longest before the frozen night

Why the cottonwood’s branchesreach

highestabove hidden stones

theColorado’s tributaries course dry

throughher father’s fields & the blue-red blood

in hermother’s veins does not move at all