Cicadas ambled

up the tree, branches

straining moonlight

on their glinting shells

left behind now,

clinging to the bark,

furrowed racetrack

abandoned for the air.

How the race

must have changed then,

above the squashed

red-yellow drupes. 

Think of the one 

who led, euphoric

in first place,

only to see another

soaring off, to hear

his taunting song—

or better, think

of the lowly underdog,

inches above soil,

and nearly giving up.

Perhaps he wondered,

I left the earth for this?

feeling strange

before the rupture,

the carapace

parting to expose

gossamer revelation.

Unfurled and flying,

he forgot the race—

said, No, no, 

this isn’t for me, 

said, No, no, 

I can sing like a saw.

In the mariners’ church,

those dredged from the sea

laid out like fresh catch.

Identified by candlelight,

dried foam at their mouth,

the sea changed them.

Carried to the limits of water,

the waves rescinded their promise,

leaving them white as whalebone.

Lastly seeing

the ultramarine world

they occupied completely;

their ship impossibly stalled overhead,

skulking like some legendary creature

in the reachless dropdown light.

Below, the bones,

wrack and sump

of those never recovered;

while the fortunate ones

lay patiently in the drowned room,

waiting to be given back their names.

Holding her eye-level after the bath,

the towel damp under her arms,

she cranes back and looks at me

almost cross-eyed, as if until now

she’s seen my face in pieces: eyes,

nose, in the same orbit, uncontained

by any outer limit. Now she sees

the whole.  She steadies herself,

her palms on each side of my neck,

and out pours the fountain of her

breath, uncolored by milk and those

first two teeth beneath the pink

glaze of her gums. She leans forward,

her mouth moves over my nose,

mouth, chin— her warm face asking

for mine, all of it, and now.

Who came down first, I’ll never

know, but I suspect a

fledgling fell, down the cabin

chimney flue, and couldn’t, didn’t

fly, so new, the wings, the body

ready but not ready,

so fell.  And does a house wren

calculate the cost of not

one, but two, fledglings lost? I

wasn’t there. I didn’t see.

No one consulted me

about the nest. Wise enough

in summer, yes, without a

fire, I think I see, and yet

the fledglings fell down my cabin

flue, and landed hard inside

the firebox. I’m trying now

to understand the weeks of

open beaks that drew her down.

Trusting what humans make, down

she went into what might have been

an empty grate, a simple room,

a window open on

another day, but wasn’t.

Once trapped the three spent themselves

against the glass stove door. I

wasn’t here. I didn’t hear

whatever language wrens might

sing to me.  I have not learned

it. So light for flight but

didn’t fly. I found them later,

first one fledgling, buffeting

a small regret. But then

another, and the mother.

They cried, the three. They beat the glass.

I didn’t hear.  I didn’t see.

Hillsborough, County Down, September 15, 2012

He must have thought it another bloody

rough and tumble scrum,

a bone crushing brawl

heads bashing, the thud of bodies,

skin burning, eyes mud-blinded

arms and legs slipping through his fingers.

Sin-binned.

But he was on his farm.

Sweet-scented breezes slipped

down from Slievenamon.

The Holsteins lowed in the upper pasture

as twilight flooded his fields, a buzz saw snap

from where he first played in Ballynahinch.

And from my mother’s grassy-knolled farm

where on summer nights

a hundred couples quickstepped under a canopy

like one wild whirlwind

and I, spun by powerful men like him

who radiated such heat,

I thought they had sprung whole

from loamy peat. Bejesus

he must have said to himself. Holy shit.

At the last, memories looked back at him

with greedy eyes: pricking his tiny fingers

picking blueberries, running the leather

with his brother and his Da.

He must have extended his hand

to them. Up the field, boys, his sister swore

she heard him say when she went out

to call them to supper.

And then the full press,

the kick, the thrill

of rushing them all home.

for J.

A cardinal flies straight into my window, stuns himself,

the sound of his body ripples against glass even after

he falls confounded and quiet in the bushes below.

By the time I rush out on the porch, his body is aloft,

dazed the way you stumbled out of that bar the night

before your wedding, all flurry of white

from your chiffon dress and that ridiculous veil

we made you wear. You were at four martinis

too many, so you bent and whispered against my temple

I don’t really want to marry him, I just want to marry someone

1. Then you laughed and planted a reassuring kiss

on my temple: we were thirty with college debt,

corporate jobs, and bank accounts that made us want

to croon the blues, so naturally, this was next.

I wanted then to say you don’t have to marry him,

or anybody else. That you could take that trip to Majorca,

watch cicadas swarm the air and land in glasses of champagne

the pavement later strewn with their husks. I wish

I had whispered leave him and that we’d taken off

giggling, two swans, trailing our milky dresses

through puddles, our heels sticking in the cracks

of cobblestone streets. We would have driven all night

away from the fuss of chair covers and seven-tiered

cakes, to the days of rooftop merengue in Seville,

our awkward shuffling as if we’d just discovered

our bodies, back to Luis and Juan Carlos who kissed us

under the wisteria though neither of us could tell

which was which–a phantom life, streaking past us

in phosphorescent plumage and brown limbs.

Instead, we walked back to the hotel arm in arm,

words hanging ripe and heavy between us. Within minutes

you fell asleep, and all I could do was pull off your peacock

blue shoes, weary with vodka stains, and with a washcloth

try to wipe your waterproof lipstick from my temple,

that glittering red streak, a buoy, its silhouette still bobbing

whenever I shut my eyes.