Читать книгу Selfi americano - Curtis Bauer - Страница 23

A half thousand punctuations

flap through this late October

morning. They quotation mark

the clouds, the clouds mimic them.

Negative space that does nothing

but deepen the space around them.

Like crows north of here, dawn

raises a curling wave of them,

a wave toward the sun’s shore, or the far edge

of this town, at least. They wash over

trees, over sparrows and broken kites quaking

awake this morning on the power lines.

No children walking to school yet.

No laughter. But theirs, like metal

slipping on metal in the mechanic’s

garage. Grackle, a color

darkened by desert light,

by cold. Rain turns black under them flying.

Mornings they don’t punctuate the ground

but edit from above. Their eyes

dark moving within dark. A shine

there pulling in what is lighter.

They will outlast us who live here

growing their burrs and knots

fragmenting the sky. They are

always in front of a brighter day.

Each tree they leave floats in their wake,

joined to the earth by shared roots.