The Glass Wing

heavy as a mountain

translucent as ice

broken from a great body

its feathers melting like snow

the shard of a hill

snapped from a potter’s hand

then laid in a box

on the prison island of birds

a vice of brightness

surrounded by broken windows

crowds of eyes of dust

the steel bones like fingers

opening from a clenched hand

it shimmers in the afternoon

the tremendous wing

o frozen dream of flight

o grave shoveled by the sun

for Ai Weiwei

The Beginning of Evening

When the northern sky grew pale

with the setting of the sun,

and one half of the sky

held the other in its hand,

and the western streets knew winter,

and the cities were as grass,

and you were here among the hidden

like a child among the lost,

still the quietness was there, still

the shadows closed the blinds,

still the door between the windows

opened to your small, cold hands,

till a drift of southern swallows

swept above the apple trees,

and you slept among the rushes

beneath wasps and flies and bees.