The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by William Page
Shadows
Did God take enough time with the sparrow? Always hungry it pecks at crumbs in the parking lot where I go in the night, where the street light waves to a taxi speeding with a cargo on their way to their corners. The locked down museum and the taxi’s meter follow the laws of nature, though knowing nothing of the hidden side of the moon or of calculus of children’s dreams or that a rooster will be crowing in the morning when a wife pours coffee as a kitten curled in a corner breathes in and out delicately as drifting seeds of a dandelion. Meanwhile, the sparrow has flown to the limb of a leafing elm and is chirping at something we can’t see. Far away, the moon casts shadows of a bat’s wings sweeping across a window leaving shadows to do what shadows must do. Driving with Ace
The grass was green. The road was black. The wheels turned forward as they would in a life-like movie. Ace was beside me. We were moving on fast, craving a few beers where the girls were we’d be dancing with and we’d be wanting more than they would give. Soon night would fall like coal soot. Trees along Highway 104 gave their leaves to rustling as we passed. The moon was shining like a bald head between the clouds. Around a curve we came upon a circling blue light
and a man sweeping the air with the beam of a long flashlight. A pistol was holstered at his side. Shattered glass and pieces of metal were scattered on the roadway and ground. We got out to see the wrecked car, lying upside down, and in the stillness of the evening Ace pulled back a sheet from a face whose eyes stared up, not seeing the blinking stars. We drove on in the darkening night. We met the girls. The girls grew older, married and moved away. Highway 104 got widened. Ace took back his given name and got a job at Randell’s Mortuary, incinerating the dead in a blazing furnace, roaring to two thousand degrees. A soul leaving the dead weighs less than a fraction of an ounce according to the National Enquirer. But Ace, née David, firing up his furnace, says he knows nothing about the weight of souls and doesn’t care how many angels theologians have claimed could dance upon the head of a pin, but down the road at Denim & Diamonds he’s danced with Denise and Danielle and says either of them is angel enough to open the door of heaven. To Know As a small child when I saw a goldfish swimming in a lily pond I might have thought a piece of sun had broken off and fallen from the sky. The opinions of children sometimes soft as air can also be hard as iron. I was told the swirl of water down a drain takes direction relative to the equator’s position. But the Coriolis effect is weak as water. A pipe’s position determines rotation of flow. Many people will believe anything if they read it in a book, especially if its cover is black and it has many pages. When I travel I watch for laws of movement. But seeing cause and effect is much like balancing an egg on end. I have seen smoke rising in turns and assumed wind was moving it, though usually I don’t trust the unseen. And since I can’t see you reading this how can I be sure you’re there? Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |