March 7, 2007


Dawn comes beneath the wing of the titmouse
(coloring love persimmon)
and with it morning’s words:
He shall come down like rain on the mown field
like showers that water the earth~
And I have read
or dreamt
that indigo buntings in their nests
gaze into the stars and that the stars
gaze back at them.

Out
into the superabundance of dawn’s silence—deep
colors: tiny pink blossoms of spindly peach
trees, succulent Asian roses,
hardly seen, dark, dark translucent blue
sky with stars staring into the eyes
of sleeping buntings and the moon…opaque luminosity,
and in the dark the strange shrill of the
cat bird and the kismet of the black
cat sneaking across the lawn
almost unseen like the ghost of a thief that it is,
overhead the shimmering hunter.

Note: the correspondence, the resonance between
stars and angels, and angels and birds,
a spiritual assonance, a treasure trove
of the mysterium: Give your angels charge
over those who sleep is the prayer of the night,
and we wake to stars and bird song: birds
who taught us to speak; stars that sing
with the voice of angels, and gaze into the eyes
of birds that nest in the clefts of trees.