a small spectacle

I need a mystic to interpret this morning’s conversation between two crows—a series of coos and clicks, I swear, sounds like love. I need a new word for grief after seeing a barred owl on the highway, the lift of feathers in the wake of every passing car, as if the joy of flight is a memory that cannot be undone.

In the church of a weeping cherry After a storm, the miracle of pale pink flowers, tissue-paper lanterns glimmering with honey light. We seek shelter in this humming cathedral, held together by cascading branches and hundreds of cellophane wings glinting. The gloss of promise overwhelms, even in winter’s false spring—a feast for bees already heavy with pollen baskets. A chipping sparrow makes a trilling entrance, tilts its copper crown; together, we listen.

I hope you are enjoying a small spectacle. Following is a tanka, a Japanese poetic form consisting of five lines, in honor of the vernal equinox. * on the first day of spring praise for the pollen- dusted bees in the weeping cherry—their welcome buzzing hum, a solace from pistol pops and revving trucks. This pollen-dusted bee was photographed last spring in the viburnums, which were dug up and replaced with native shrubs and flowers soon to be in bloom.

This is where grief leaves us In a vacated house where sadness sings endlessly as a mockingbird, flaunting white wing bars to guard the absurdity of bright red holly berries. We acclimate to the familiar darkness of winter, ice-fogged windows framing the slow procession of a world we cannot enter, give thanks for the sustenance of silence, tiny embers lighting this ancient cave, the body.

Let it be found in an ordinary thing— the slender teardrop of a daffodil just before it blooms, pale white violet, bittercress and bird’s eye speedwell, too, a tulip tree’s velvet buds, and chorus frogs calling from the stream behind the house like hundreds of fingertips raking across teeth on a plastic comb.

wrapped in the gauze of dawn soft muzzle to damp cheek bristle of whiskers from a little wolf to conjoin fur with ribs as if to keep me from drifting

I give my grief to the cypress tree, blown down by a winter storm, wood chips like ashes, the staccato of logs tossed onto a pile by the rusted burn barrel— a makeshift altar to honor what gave us the melodic song of a wood thrush that one summer, bark ribbons curled in the mouths of mothers, giant leopard moths waiting out the day, a thousand silhouettes at sunset, carpet of green needles, hummingbirds in hiding, the ghost of an orange & white cat napping beneath sweeping, low branches

my hand, the eagle on your chest, rising & falling, the ruby of a star, pulsating brilliant as a supergiant dying, we wait for night to close curling inward like evergreen leaves to protect our fire

After so many days of rain Another mass shooting, this time at a ballroom dance studio on the cusp of the Lunar New Year. I start believing this is what we deserve— a world clouded-over & without light. I let the gray haze have its way, darken every room, until the song from a Carolina wren bubbles up, cheer, cheer, cheer.

a short poem