Even the bees I’d swear were sent to protect us in the delicate business of hives and honey are stung to silence by the news that something winged has lost its flight.

Editors keep pushingdeadline strain while people sleep on benches and subway grates; a welter weight boxer danceson the platform at 125th Streetstation, commuters look unfazed...

Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbsabout what was happeningin the metropolis, realizing,in the scorched plum of dusk,actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....

I wonder what became of you, your JohnnyRotten skin, no Emerald City eyes.You'd have been a beauty if you let inferiority steam your glasses with its candor, sans laughter.

How long before the eaves gave wayto the sky, or the bathroom floor was jack-hammered to bone,while the trees outside were leftto redirect the wind?How quickly the den must have become more kitchenand bedrooms lost their privacy. I see the bookswe’d packed up and moved years ago under a pile of fresh rubble, still sending off dust—titles stunned to a babblein gold leaf.

Such is a communityof inviolable immunity, protectedfrom tampering or harpooningmutiny. Every better thinker’s impulse to shrink us (at the shoreline from our lifeblood’s deep pulse) uses disparaging scrutiny to sink us.

Oblong stones sink slow and sideways. Shaped by the weight of waves,dutifully vibrating nature’s lunar-bound graces, they wash ashore only for closed palms to forsake them. The cheerful will cherish them, place themon windowsills, or on graves.

As a woman still,without the right kind of mouth,my tongue’s of no use.

And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seedsfor the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose.

It was as if someone had leftthe bird thereas a kind of telegramof feathers, oily feathersthat looked like they’d struggled,shuttered a little before letting gointo flightforever.