Each Bird

Where there is foot traffic there is industry,
where there once was murder, pairs of lovely legs
made love (yes love again and to come) in the grass.
By this thought I am dizzy, staring at the swaying
shadow of leaves, branches blurred flat, furry
patterning arhythmically on the pavement -

Each bird is this poem’s color against – no, with
the asphalt, between the white stripes, wherein
strollers cavort, fertile, intrepid, antique,
soft with age, browning beneath the blaze
refracting daylight. Here I am beaten
by the swish, a favorite sundress delivers
the lash, chased by humor of children
in the park where I played ball with
my brother on Memorial Day. The same
park where I tossed a Frisbee with students,
a librarian, a painter, and Brazilian woman
a close friend of a young philosopher
headed to teach in Lyon. These thoughts,
each a person in their own make me think
about the beer we drank, both times after
the park, at the bar on the patio –

This page may as well be a wet napkin.
The t-shirt full of breasts, and the glare
from a projection, its hiss and click,
flash smiles. The grimace; my head is tilted
the direction of the slope, as if it wants
to be parallel to it; as if it wants to
gravitate to the lead (still debating beauty).
As if to prove something fast, futile -
how death doesn’t defeat love, how love
sort of floats. How love is decadent,
ignorant about the flashing hand
at the crosswalk, insipid, orange as in
a contemporary poem; the kind of literature
which fails before someone, some thing
shapely, wanting. Here born on the street,
litter, litany, final, absolute always there

disappearing, an old woman dark as coal.
Gray hair, pupils clouding, mouth pursed
proud, she carries four black plastic bags.
Each filled with plastic bottles, with the other
hand full of a handle bar to a cart she pushes,
the black bags’ handles impress upon the skin of
her fore arm. Her sense of gravity must be different
than mine, and yet here we are in this neighborhood
together, passing, as people all over the world
pass each other, by sandal, by luxury car –