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Two Ravens
We circled each other,
trading pinnacles and views.
I scrambled up to where they
simply lifted off,
I threw an apple core into the wide
windy space beneath us:
neither one flinched, neither
moved an inch as it fell
out of sight—the used-up free-
fallen apple of my eye.
If they blinked, I couldn’t see it—
black eye in black socket—
radiant black, black hole black.
And wings like liquid basalt.
They looked like rooks,
like any old crow,
except when they were close enough
to call to—perched on a rock
like pure exaggeration.
Hydraulic press, I thought.
Kettle and reticent pot.
What they thought of me
they kept to themselves—
not one squawk, not one dire utterance—
though by their dark demeanor
I gathered I was something
of a disappointment—
a scavenged picnic, a bone picked clean.
Or maybe they saw through
the point I climbed up to—
winded, heart beating hard—
and like the living daylight’s negative
took the measure of darkness
there, left me to scribble
in my own black book.
first published in 32 Poems, spring 2005
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K
Sturdiest of consonants—oak of the forest,
clap of the hand, flying buttress
at the back of the throat. As upright
as a monk in a garden hoeing corn,
tending rows of new tomatoes, shoveling
dung in a cowshed done milking the cows
at dawn. Potash of flue dust
melted into glass. Salty cant of sailors
in the harbor at Tyre. Fulcrum,
pivot, ricochet—sheer
kinetic fury of hot gas—the big
bang in kosmos, silent prayer in kneel.
Kingmaker, capstone, coral reef,
sand bank where waves break in long lines
off the coast. Assurance in OK, swift
jab and black-out in KO.
In heaven, cumulus; kilometer on earth.
Worth its weight in gold, pearl, salt.
Clap of the hand, coldest of zeros:
slows the restless atom to a halt.
first published in Poetry Northwest, spring 1996
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