Three Poems

Keepsake

The friend who betrayed
me, I hold no malice
toward him, remembering when
we drove the backroads
of Western Massachusetts,
and wild turkeys, barely lit by what red
remained of a sunset, crossed the road
and we stopped to let them pass.
We stopped talking, after hours
of talk, and watched those ghosts,
those turkey-shaped shadows,
slowly cross a narrow road
into woods where it was already night.

Lost March

Plague sky slashed lavender.
Horizon blotted out.

The world wrought through a window
one fogged frame at a time.

Nothing but the breath hums

and animals—
those sparrows

suspended in a parallel dimension.
They sense the seam
spring becomes,

while we winter in our rooms
and wait

for the blur to find a form.
Wait for the day

to attach to a name.

Late Time

The weather is panic
evaporated into gusts

of cold sun. White sun
cracking gray clouds

bulked low
on the horizon.

What am I
but an animal

lumbering
through a late time

waiting for
an impossible spring,

waiting for
the mind to settle,

for static to sink
beneath song.

I wait for relief.
I wait for the heart

to open, for
the voice to thaw.

And sparrows,
how do they survive

hollow-boned
in an arctic blast?

Yesterday’s news:
wet confetti

scattered over
curbside slush.

Cold, white sun
lands across my face

as I turn a corner;
and I am weightless

without a name,
nameless without

a form, dissolved
into particulars

unspooled into
consciousness,

unwinding
into a world

never more
than now.