Mirror of Flesh

"Crude dove, clay piggy bank,
on your grieving back a sign, something
that barely deciphers you. My people,
how–shouldering your sorrows,
beaten and subdued – how did you manage
to accumulate naked science?"
– Neruda, from "Pottery Shop"







The last of the lonely eagles–
silhouette of brown fire erupts
from the corner of the window so close
as to fill its squared artificiality,
a frame of such thin space between the eye
and the lofty corpuscles of flight,
and I follow by binocular lens as I can
up into invisible thermals that that lift of the brown back,
that fold of perfectly dabbled
feather by a flight that is as much magic
as it is circling tension.
Alone now to the top of the peak of the river cotton wood
alone now for the night
as the pewter dust of sunset
settles to the surface of the bay,
the eagle watches, surfeited,
hungry, veins pulsing by a new torsion of blood,
heart as thin as the air
or a pane of glass between
the love march of the ages
and two eyes that cast forever
these mirrors of our own flesh.