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Jack Marshall
Bird, are you still
As living tends to be more alive
on the wing, or else quicker
speared than allows a sigh
for news of distant deaths and near
capital, collateral, and close-
up damage, may I inquire,
Bird, are you still
on the wing, and your song,
wish's wormhole
to warmer portals, so keen
a sound, makes a mood almost
making up what can't be seen
or felt yet? Somewhere
is summer,
and you there,
are you still foraging
for us, you promissory, necessary,
startling thing?
The Curve
The cats are in: out of seven,
four are left; when I count,
there seems even less of them
this winter that has come near
to throwing overboard many hearts as it heaves
and hungers on like the hunger
that feeds the heaven of virgins
available, unveiled, eager to love to pieces
their promised, piece-meal lovers; or as when
in an animal's eyes we're seen,
held in a grip tighter than a gaze,
guarded, still, growing curious, then
assured, easing, until unthreatened,
losing interest in our presence,
we've been released, just when it seemed
fixed on us before turning aside,
like the barely remembered summer gone by,
drawn back to the bottomless well running dry.
As one gets older and slips into seeing less
in the human world of the best
of what there is to express,
grief
cuts eloquence
brief.
So, bless the voices stressed
leaving cell-phone messages, one hand on wheel
in freeway traffic, wishing Merry Christmas,
who, if distracted, will, statistically, die
in holiday traffic which, honest, is more a mob
on wheels, for we're not going to be
able to tell what's real when we come to the hedge
we peel off and go floating
over, feeling a dreamy uncertainty on the edge
of which world we're in, like a story which leaves
out a too-real page
unturned in our lives
we look forward to and find later
not treasure in the flowering
but the remembering after, and once more
I know I'll be slow behind the curve
when absolute zero unpacks its bags and installs April's
sunny tunes and smiles on the walls we fasten to live on earth.
Jack Marshall was born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who emigrated from Iraq and Syria, and now lives in California. He is the author of the memoir From Baghdad to Brooklyn and poetry collections that have received the PEN Center USA Award, two Northern California Book Awards, and a nomination from the National Book Critics Circle, including Sesame, Gorgeous Chaos, Millennium Fever, and his newest, Spiral Trace, to be released in June 2013.