Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth
———-——W.H. Auden
An inversion layer hangs over my neighborhood,
sounds carom off the ground, bounce the ether.
The tone is clear, the meaning jumbled.
Familiar voices—neighbors and friends,
dog walkers, yard workers, house painters, roofing
crews—fit loose and comfortably in my ears.
Mothers and nannies push prams; I hear them too.
But I don’t get what they are saying: Stop the pesticide
wings from the end of the street to the corner; an illegal
occultation pings garden buttresses, the curbs.
The response is extortionate, I seem to hear;
—————————-—what they are doing is liminal.
An osprey, drawn inland by the sound, perches
on the tall cob of a dead maple, menacing the rabbits
in a patch of woods, eyeing the nearby chickens.
She is not confused by the inversion; it suits just fine.
Fences are down, restraints are off. Her mask darkens,
her beak sharpens, her eyes glint terribly. She does not move.
The voices drown the neighborhood in weird phrases.
From the silver to the scree. Gory to the starters.
—————————-—Go back to lowland; we despise you still.
Jinking through the yards, a host of sparrows swoops
from darkness to darkness.
Jonathan Cohen’s poems have appeared in Stone Canoe Journal, I-70 Review, Cloudbank, Great Lakes Review, Naugatuck River Review, Cider Press Review, and others. A native of Buffalo, he studies with Jon Davis.
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash