Are you the leather bellows stoking fire or a boy gasping after a stray kite?Are you the edge-spar or the troposphere tearing it free? Are you streaked like malachite or pierced with stars? The wheezy, exigent container of the dim confessionalor the passport photo booth, the flash’s glint? The sound of hammer-falls that miss the …
Lacrimae rerumJarred from our half-sleeping, we hear its muffled chorus past words, past caring for us,and think the sheetrock’s weeping. Shrill sighs, like a rusty piston.We press an ear to listen—the burst of a yowled report (our synapses misfiringor the whining of old wiring)dies down. How else interpret this noise next-door sings except as the …
What little we’ve reclaimed of what they were has become its name, a confection for the ear. Bush cricket. Pupfish. Amur tiger. Man.We think these two divergent trend lines mean the rise of this one species brought the fallof all else: ash trees, breeds of waterfowl. At first, we blamed a meteor, but now strong …