Friday, May 29, 2015

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.