Pelicans

Slowly circling,
the pelican
 
drops like a stone
into water.
 
Then climbing the
air, he stops, and
 
with a single
motion of wings,
 
glides on the wind.

Gabriel's Coming

Things did not turn out
as perfectly as we had hoped. When
the doctors
extracted him
from the womb, there he was
 
a twisted pretzel of
a person, this child
who was
to be
perfect,
 
shaking and bloody
as a wounded bird and
not much different:
 
from the bony shoulders,
like broken wings,
crooked arms splayed up
to the curled hands
that seemed jammed
under a quivering
chin
(...)

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Castle on the River Cher

Torchlit halls linked galleries
and ballrooms. The castle itself
linked the banks of the river
with black-and-white tiles
 
that felt minuets and waltzes.
Later, pawns crossed the checkerboard
that was then scuffed by
the jackboots of soldiers
 
of a “thousand year Reich”
that lasted only twelve—
a fraction of the fuehrer’s
promised prediction.
 
Paying the Loire tribute,
Cher rises in the northwest,
then flows across a plateau
to join the Yevre at Vierzon.
  
Eighteenth century masons
built the chateau on pilings
of a sixteenth century mill:
(...)

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On Modest Mussoursky's "Bydlo"

 
A shape appears
and is gone,
comes into view,
disappears, until,
cresting the hill,
the spot
blotting the sun,
a cartload of hay,
takes shape.
 
Emerging,
the wagon,
oxen-drawn, a juggernaut pulled
by two thousand pounds,
rolls between fields--
grinding dirt,
crushing stones.
 
Sweating flanks
of coarse,
matted hair
cause slow,
(...)

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The Ancient Flocks of Wilson Street

They flock
to the park
cloaked in black,
perched on benches in the Winter sun,
the bills of their ball caps, like beaks,
dip in and out.

 
Like grackles
surrounding bread crumbs,
the ancient Armenians
ease their emotional baggage—
too young to remember
but old enough to recall those
who lived through
or died from
the Turkish carnage.
Surrounding the tables
filled with scattered dominoes,
on Christmas eve,
the old men chatter
about the old country
and its new destruction,
(...)

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