Echolocation
Perched on the
secretary, the peace lily boasts three blossoms
but I know where I
belong; this morning my dining room is swollen in silence.
I’m thinking you were right,
that the violins know more than we do,
even in our dreams. And where
would all this missing go? So long now
I’ve been waiting for the end of winter—
but the tired crunch of snow makes good company
for impatience. Open your mouth
and try your lungs—let the song cross kilometers
to reach me,
may it burrow in my breast—secure my heart in baritone,
learn its curves and send back a sketch
in the deftness of bio sonar—invisible,
tethered.
Ultrasonic
My name rolls through your lips, faint between
the hiss and gurgle of the coffee pot.
The low cackles of geese cram the pauses
in our after-dinner squabbling,
and the toc-toc-toc of the yellow-shafted flicker
fills entire afternoons—
so, too, all the pretty music they play on the radio.
But my eyes, though tired, embrace hieroglyphs—
the collar of your three-pack white tee shirt
caught between your teeth;
copper lichen in a simulacrum
of empire on rock; and the shine of white
rebounding off the mountain peak—
yet I, too, call—failing, I call and I call—
