Two Poems 0 comments

Lia Purpura

Crows and Grackles

Leaves fall. The grackles stay attached.
Invest themselves, soft fruit in the branches,
speckling.

Leaves fall. Crows have eyes for other things—
a ruby weeping past the throat, a cherry
cloaking pecan-colored slopes of pearl.

Small nuisances, those with nervous flitting,
grackles collapsing gusts into roads.
Stirring up leaves, falling together like fool’s

gold. Too much desire rushing fortune.
Grackles go as speckled grain in a golden pour,
as if the mind of cold were done.

But crows can slip through needles’ eyes:
branch tip to tip. Someone’s needle.
Their sheen is a mending: a flock of them picks

at every bright thing. They bank the heavy sigh
my thinking is today. Bank trees and fall
into air. Look up.

The sky is the color of anyone’s
unshined, best candelabra. Grackles come
as if the setting were not formal,

as if the emptiness required nothing
ceremonial. Crows lift themselves, alight
in trees—small courtesy—to ease the darkening.

Transcendence

Handhold
along silence’s
towpath, green
at the edges
and a rope in the teeth.
It should lead us from snippets.
Deliver itself, flat light
like a message unbottled.

Train, otherwise, for it
with permafrost grays.
Surface-freeze milk.
With ladders. With chains.
Though shouldn’t there be
a blanket to lift
for glimpsing, blue
blanket, Yours,
and an ear at the door?

Shouldn’t a voice
be tuning, white plates
be dropping and shattering
the courteous silence?