Little Speech
What starts with a song and suppleness,
wings tossing the warm air in dance,
becomes the yearly lake bedding —
feather-woven grasses underlain by floating roots:
two eggs: thighs, legs, petty claws cramped
inside round the shell.
The greater adult cranes take turns
ranging where house lights and star lights jostle,
a gaunt shadow on the green
ever stabbing for a meal, listening.
In a spring that is still sweet,
the familiar’s rolling slightly descending hkkkkkkkk
eventually comes, weird and lovely,
as if in the little speech of harm
all things from nothing appear —
slithering gator on the bank, coyote,
snake —
and to greater nothing return. Egg gone.
Nature, the crane is telling, has no intent.
* * * * *
Spring Summer Fall Winter
Undesirable you may have become, wept over
by no one, your green age passed by.
Don’t you remember the first chill
in the fires wasting August,
our last great season? You came to me and spoke
as if I were a figment, wringing perfection
out of my imperfection. Oh, it’s you,
you said, when you walked closer.
We will miss autumns
when two can sit together and say out
all things in our hearts.
Winter menaces all talk.
As estimated, you will die before
I die.
Had it been otherwise,
I might have thought our love
with its grudges was more than enough,
smoke from heart’s fire
drifting through a few last scenes —
hand-in-hand figures on a porch, a fire —
not spring’s false branch, avowal, avowal.