A crow heralds in the dawn atop a foreclosed house, the dawn sculpted in blacks and grays. A few short minutes earlier the sky was dark, glass-clear, littered with those furtive constellations. The great bear six blocks away, just shy of stepping on a satellite dish. Damp streets and porch lights, an owl cutting circles high above. Now the facade of a rainy day as snails finish their abusive rounds. Slick streets and morning faces. Everywhere the work of birds.
Another ten minutes, it is blue sky blues and the morning paper in the drive. Words picked from a barrel of back-shot fish, music from gravel and gutter pipes. Nothing left right enough to read, the works spent so long ago that even meaning is no longer meant. All us wise old inheritors of the childhoods of our elders, stuck imagining that worse is truly better.
Had I a pen-pal I would write a letter. Had I a rhyme I would untangle my verse. Instead it is the bitter principled sameness of every different day, wearing the mask of last week's loss. Instead it is the rivers of difference all adding up to this plain ocean. The insistence of each instant, the futility of all this clinging, the further uselessness of this earnest abandon. Bound to the world just by being, the victory of countless strange ancestries and several orders more oblivion. Bound to our own limited egress and uncalled for aggressions. The seething victims of these automatic rituals and pyrrhic victories of life as of yet unending.
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