In a corner of the parking lot,
a small forest waiting to be chipped,
balsam, spruce, Scotch pine
shouldered together in the hard
January light, some still aglint
with stray tinsel, needle and bough
a scumble of brushstrokes
against the sky’s blue page,
here and there a wreath,
painted pinecone,
smuggled sack of leaves.
The flocked lie off to one side,
softwood crosstrees
tacked to each dry stump,
their dead-white ironies
postmodernist, poor mulch.
Yet everywhere, faint breath
of the boreal, and tossed
atop the rest, brown spikes
long stripped, a skeleton
of last year’s tree bears up
its tattered garland of a summer nest,
flagged with cellophane.
Not far from their pickup,
a couple and a child
wade green branches,
heads bent, watchful where they step,
seeking the bright thing fallen.
After Daumier
Two crows on Terrace St.,
black beaks tugging
stripes of squirrel
from grey pavement,
a breath of red fur
still glossing the breeze,
the crows’ sheen
chaste and juridical. They part
just enough for my car,
then turn in the mirror
shrewdly to their labors.
How often now they pace our lots
circumspect in pairs,
flipping the crushed leaf of a lunchsack,
or at dusk, convening in the trees
above the fairways of the country club,
familiar and at ease, entirely
untroubled we might hear
their gargled conversations–
jocular, amused, roundly oracular,
as if they could relax,
the verdict in, the sentence passed,
our long and costly trial
come at last to judgement.
Grasshoppers
November, by the stubblefield,
what’s left of Tuesday’s snow
slabbed in shaded swales;
on the red weeds sun enough
for every step to fan
a gray-green chirr of wings.
Some whir down
where snow’s iced hard as china,
and chill there to a crawl,
the clever, hooked tarsals
still pulling them along.
But already on the white glaze
creep hundreds, each moment
deepening their cold
while warm black loam
looms always just beyond.
It is impossible to walk here
without stirring more
onto the snow. The sun
rises higher, but for now
not a bird has found them
as one by one, they stall
in a slow tai chi,
torpid, comical, sublime.
