PARALLEL UNIVERSES: VILLANELLE A
sparrow zooms perpendicular into an ash tree;
leopard
markings, a black head, and it's gone.
Fledgling
doves zigzag, suspended, through the street.
An
empty hearse glides by, from some secret fleet.
Sparrows
skitter, singing their cacophonous, atonal song.
One
zooms perpendicular into an ash tree.
Pablo
Neruda was tendered a toy wooly
lamb
through a fence's hole. He returned with a pine cone.
Fledgling
doves zigzag, suspended, through the street.
It
surprises me that the boy was still there to receive it.
As
though they lived in parallel universes, alone.
A
sparrow zooms perpendicular into an ash tree.
It's
how old lovers live, parallel, never to see
one
another again except bobbing above hedgerows,
as
fledgling doves zigzag, suspended, through the street.
We
bleed and we slough skin and we heal, particles free
and
recombining, eternally done and undone.
A
sparrow zooms perpendicular into an ash tree.
Fledgling
doves zigzag, suspended, through the street.
END OF SUMMER1
In July's long heat wave we felt
we were dead, or we were the
living dead.
We had no hunger, no hungers.
We couldn't wail.We couldn't smell
or even taste.But now, the aroma of coffee,
the door open, traffic shushing
by.
A phone ringing, jazz, blues,
gospel in the air.
A fly examines my flesh
for rottenness––grease, dirt,
any way in.
It's cold enough in the morning
now
to change the trees quickly
like adolescence.
I like the way the sky opens in
winter––
another month or two; I expect
to live
to see it.But who knows?Who ever knows?
2
The Rose of Sharon, the crape
myrtle, opulent
fat and messy at the end of
their season.
I love them.They are a part of my life.
I have lived in this place
longer than anywhere,
even childhood.
I am planted here, yet every day
I think about moving.
CURTAINS
Let us learn
to live swaying / As in a rocking boat on the sea.
––Friedrich
Holderlin, trans. Robert Bly
The four of us walk in cold
light rain––
four umbrellas: blue, blue, rose
and beige.
The rose and the beige twirl and
bow
at the entrance of the
restaurant like a French film.
Then the pale sun of winter
curls in, around
and under the canvas curtains
that hang halfway down mullioned
double-paned windows.They sag in places
from the weight of ticking,
stitches ripped,
a panel undone.Someone begins a conversation
about the Resurrection.
The single curtain with its
folded double
torn away from it, distorts the
shadows behind it,
thickening them.The curtain is less opaque
than the others, off-center,
that is, eccentric.
A fair young woman with crimped
golden hair
sits straight up, alone at a
table by the window.
She resembles the Flemish virgin
of von Cleef's
"Annunciation" reduced on a
Christmas card.A line came to me this morning
from the unraveling edges of
sleep: "The lonely,
isolated eyes of God."
He peeks through the curtains
and sees us laughing.
RACCOONSTwo raccoons are mating outside
my window
in the violets and the rain.
It's February, 8:00 a.m., the
clouds
falling down in the side garden,
black as wet dusk.
They are tawny and masked, his
face
behind and above her face,
a double image. His claws clutch
her rump.
She squeals. He bears down.
He'll keep her where he's caught
her
between the tupelo and the
streaked pine fence
until it's done. This isn't
Valentine's Day.
He may stay with her in a den in
a tree
until the kits are born, but
then he's gone.
Still, I am drawn to them
as to something holy. I put
Enya's
"How Can I Keep from Singing" on
the CD player
and begin T'ai Chi. They have
keen ears,
but I have vanished in their
urgency.
One last piercing scream from
her and I see
him ambling toward the Joseph's
Coat roses
pruned and knobby against the
back fence.
She is nowhere to be seen.
The violets have just begun to
bloom
sending a musky scent out
through all the backyards of the
neighborhood.
Jane Blue's poems have been published
recently in Convergence and
Caesura, and earlier in
such magazines as Avatar, Poetry International, The Chattahoochee Review, The
Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Louisville Review, Antigonish, and Spoon River Poetry Review.She was born and raised in Berkeley, California, and now lives near the
Sacramento River.
