Returning
Last year, I didn’t cut back any
saplings. This year, the house rises,
held in the cupped palm of a nest
of twisted branches furred with offshoot
leaves like forked rivers. Last year,
I swam below the dam as houses
drove across the bridge on the straight
backs of flatbed trucks. This year,
I sit in warm, manmade tubs in
a string of buildings along the Jim River,
drought-dried so low rogue corn grows
on the new sandbars. At the WNAX building
completely surrounded by planted pines,
we pass what once was America’s tallest
radio tower, flickering red now
to tell the planes there’s something here
sending sound out into the night.
What I own are particles I pay to light like
wind turbines birds fly into anyway, maybe
because the thrum draws the bugs that are good
to eat in the warm late summer when
the treehouses have been built from dryer
lint and everyone who’s going to make it
flies as high as the apartment attics.
* * * * *
Shimmer
— after James Schuyler
The jet trails that yesterday cut the sky
in strips today dissolve the blue
completely into dishwater
no-color. Was it that I let the garden plot
go to seed? All the weeds bloom dandelion-style
heads shimmering light-gray as the sky. The October
gold turns leaf by leaf, just one per tree.
The Argus Leader says a tiger at the zoo fell
sick with what the humans have. I drink
a tea whose white ice sweats clear on glass. If white
is made from all light, how did the contrail cancel
the blue? Or did it shoot blue back through
its prism, joining the rest of all color?
Or did the blue diffuse
like a smell from a bottle, muted
as when someone wears it all day? Today,
all the other big cats sick, a snow leopard,
classified “vulnerable in the wild,” died
at the zoo in Sioux Falls; her mate paces, coughing too.