Out of the coiled steps of its lament the music makes a wider arc, leaving the shuttered room it paced all night alone
to find morning outside the house: a cypress layering green into the gray, and two men chatting, hands in pockets, crossing the street,
walking over pavement merged with familiar mists. Sea and headland breathing in all day, out all night. Human measures at land’s end.
I take that music with me through the fog of western San Francisco, to the bluff facing Lake Merced and the hidden ocean;
it keeps me standing there just long enough to see a pair of crows approach a cypress. First one, then the other, turns and drifts
down,
black, light, amid the layered green and gray echoed in lake water. Then the music, homing, turns like the crows: a grace of grief.
Michael Jones teaches at
Oakland High School in Oakland, CA, and performs as a violinist with the
Jupiter Chamber Players. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere.
