Carrying Off the Ravens
Our quick jackets thrown against dust and we’re out
to a patio, gradually looking
at trees. I have two hours to teach these five
young womento glory their woes and measure
their blessings. We’ve left behind winter’s wide cobwebs
and ditches. The lass next to me drapes flesh to lament
and discusses her clitoris. Another manners
each ripple and reign
of her tenuous heart. The rest of them falter to vowel
their outward tracings.
The wind is housed still
at this snug moment. Listen!
the tree sap, the earth … its entire expanse
has gone slack with a lick of repose.
The women reshuffle to impossible positions
of what’s yet to limit; this is their time
between fair and knotted, the length of such luck.
Around us, almost everything gleams.
I let them ballad their feelings, each mouthful of air
till all is extinguished
by a truck that’s stopped wobbling
down an unseen alley, fetching rotations. Unruly,
it now strews its loading notes, trudges
its drubbings. A constant track as it knits holes
to each other, and we’re hauled to the mayhem
of every exhausting command.
When the fissures finally end,
the landscape is full of the scent of a whisper.
Tall talking leaves. The sun, shiny
and zealous, and those honeyed moody women again
untangle parts of themselves, tipping their language
to wings. Ravens commit to the struggle
of boredom in aspens. Poppies lap
in the laziest breeze. Confessing their flutters.