Tragedy

A baby squirrel sat trembling, crouched on the edge of the curb in the shade of an SUV. It flicked its tail and sniffed the air, the tiny nose quivering as it sensed the overpowering world. A gust of wind almost knocked into the street, and yet it held its ground. Fearless of my approach, he looked innocently into my camera.

What more should I have done to preserve him?

An hour passed, and he lay spread on the asphalt. Red and gray, and still so tiny. The black eyes were dull, but the wind brushed through the hair of his tail, as if trying to tell him:

Get up, get up. We will go back to the curb, and you will not be in the camera but in her hands, and she will cradle you and carry you to the nook in the tree where you were born, and life will stretch out the long day before you.

But the wind could not revive him, and the tiny faceless squirrel offered no reproach.

On the violence of song

From the roots of breath
burbles the infection -
clouded and gray,
a machine soaring into the heavens
spewing pus in homage.

What is life,
that I take note of it?
Merely the not-dead
is invention, extending
the fingertips into new realms.
And eternity divine
can cast itself into the putrid flames without change:

We hover in the gap.
Singed, damaged,
bloody consumptives.
One day, one of these
will begin to sing.

Cutting, slashing
the howling song
Rouses the ashes
in hallowed vibrations,
the voice's spewing spray
coats the moaning trees.