Birdwatchers I drove, dove really, into dawn, and down to the point where the old lake melts alongside the sea, and I stood in my straw hat under the pines in the parking lot while the guide explained ocular limitation: you will hear a thousand more birds than you will ever see. He cupped his ear, whispered parula. And we all looked up, to try to see the song, have the flick of common, invisible gold. When I closed my eyes to listen, to rise above my fellow humans, I heard morning traffic, a siren, another siren, fish crows, nah-ah, nah-ah, and the birders talking, talking, talking, talking, talking, talking…

Monday   Nearly monochrome –the sidewalks, the pavement,mute walls of emptyhouses, sky.Then a little after lunch timethe sun came out,instant and sudden,glorious.The world changed.Not very much –but two rabbitsemerged from beneaththe neighbor’s back deckto ring rosy aroundthe trunkof the cottonwood,to stop on a dimewith their elegant earsalert and their nosestwitching,to drop back quietlyinto their bodies,warm soft shadowsin the dun grass.     B. J. Buckley (she/her) has worked in Arts-in-Schools/Communities programs throughout the West for more than four decades. Recent work appears in Oakwood, About Place Journal, and the anthology Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration (Jamie K. Reaser and J. Drew Lanham, Eds.). Her…

Inconsequential   The garbage disposalhas a rubber bandcaught in its throat.The butter compartmentis etched with black mold.Spiders are building empiresin corners I can’t reach.When God set the worldin motion, did she understandwhat she was unleashing?I tell myself these problemsseem larger than they arebecause I am growing old.Yet, people older than merun entire countries.Are they also awareof filaments of inattentionsnaking through everything,leaving cracks to be colonizedby what we failed to notice,sabotaged by what wasinconsequential until it wasn’t. Spared   A branch falls before dawn.A power line snaps. Somewhereup the hill, a pole ignites, burns.By the time we wake, the fire trucks are gone.The culprit is a tree we have learned to…

Groundbreaking Cat Science Shows They Love to Sit in Illusory Boxes   Aunt Ruth is perplexedwe hear in the latest update from Manchesterthough she can get up and dress herself she is rather fed up with being shut inand as she is unstablein the sense of wobblythe carers don’t want to take her out You are wondering what happened to the cats. If you draw brackets,the corners on the floor,and wait, chances are good that when the cat wanders past,it will sit inside those brackets even if there are no connecting lines. You are wondering how Aunt Ruth isand whether the bills all over are paid or unpaid. Any other…

Thorax: this arrhythmia   Once a thing is done,it cannot be taken back. It sears. It smolders. Fate seals it.The gravest mistakes we make are when grief and fear lodgein the chambers of our hearts as if they are companionswarming themselves by the atrial fire and we are taken by surpriseby someone else’s hurt, that someone else can hang fireand our impulse to spark it. Blood rushes in through a pause and leavesfull of glint and wasted time. Angina is a strangling. The heart heals by scars.It’s an involuntary muscle, unthinking or unwilling or both.To live, then, is to admit having done the unforgivable,the heart only reconciled with life’s quivering…

Letter of Introduction   While the wet field drowns and rotsseeds, I am a daffodil bulb thrivingin the ditch, a completelife cycle stored underground. A desiccated leaf drapedand frozen on the post,I bare skeleton, remnantsof organs, soul. I praise the darkness of tree trucksthat strike down power linesas they pass through intersectionswith elbows raised too high. I offer double vision: shopliftedrecollections declared as my ownand my memories, haphazardlyevaporated, raked for crystal residues. I decipher the dust-free shadows revealedwhen heirlooms are knocked off the shelf.My green eyes, when closedand pressed, reveal nebula stars. Exhausted from scratchingthrough needle drop on the forest floor,I am a spotted towhee asleep in the darkjust before…

Mandarin at the Edge of a White Formica Table He serves green tea in terracotta cups.I don’t like green tea, but I pretend. On Wednesdays, after class,I walk with other studentsto the French professors’ apartment—one-bedroom, well lit,windows facing the university park. We talk about French cinema.Film d’auteur, he says. François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard,Jean Renoir, Alan Resnais. I want to be entangled with all these namesin the dome of his mouth.His lips are dry, parched.It’s the wind in this city, he says. I know by heart the marks of his upper front teethon his lower lip, like an engraving. Roger Vadim, Agnès Varda,Jean Cocteau, Éric Rohmer. I go to the bathroom…

Postcard to Christine Stroud from the Steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral   Dear Christine, I believe a priest might sentence me to 7×70 Hail Marys for so many decades of sinning, so, often, I take whatever absolution I can find. Your name contains Christ, after all, and how well you’ve known my impure thoughts. Besides the last time was in a church I just stared at the stained-glass windows—each another fantastic fable of some saint in mid-scene. In the sun, how like a prose poem those self-contained rectangles of prismatic light. I’ve been penitent and petulant at different times, and salvation still no closer. All over, churches are being sold…

The Sighting   I knew it would start as soon as your last breath –I’d see you in a parking lot somewhere,suspenders, cap and glasses, thin white hair –I knew from what I’ve known so far of deaththese intermittent sightings would begin,I’d glimpse your denim shirt, those sloping shouldersslipping through the automatic doors,vanishing into Walmart’s crowd again.But today you took me by surpriseat the market, shuffling down an aisleso close I could turn and hug you, but your eyeswithout that glint, your face devoid of smile.No wind’s brief touch, no whispered message as youjust headed toward check-out, passing behind me, not through.     Elise Hempel‘s poems have appeared in…

Such a Human Gesture   Suppose I lived another hundred years:Still I might lack the necessary skillsTo put to words the way his ten–speed’s gears, With brown metallic teeth and oil–smooth spillsOf chain, compose a beatific roseLike Dante’s, but mechanical and gritty— The sort of vision everybody knowsWill one day find no place in the Just City,Making him homeless then, as he is now, As his unlaundered clothes and plastic bagsOf nothing can attest. Could grace allowThis rancid grease–splotched rabblement of rags A lasting spot in what, perforce, is fair?Where is there room for how he reaches backTo touch the black bag bungeed to his rack, To make sure all…