Jocasta Chides Her Boy
All soft baby elbows akimbo
    toddlers’
round prancing knees, they’re
    running
with sticks, awkwardly learning
    the weight
and velocity of stones. Oedipus,
    dear,
listen to me: you can’t stop them–
    you
must let them go–it’s all just
    play,
it’s what everyone does, all fun and
    games,
that is until someone loses
    an eye,
darling boy, till someone loses
    both eyes.
How else, best boy, to learn
    the ways
how war is love how love is the war
    of wars
How love and war and all of us
    are blind

The God of O’Clock
How the story goes: it’s half past midnight
and the time is changing to spring. No, winter.

No, spring. Buds and snow. Forth and back,
the year moves perhaps forward. Probably not.

That is to say it takes steps like they’re invisible,
like they’re a tall tale printed on melting snow.

So rain gels then thaws again, glowing
on the trees, turning the pages, feeding

the green potential, the green impossible,
that invisible green the boughs genuflect to,

that to say they welcome the sun
that illuminates their naked glory,

that would be enough to change everything
that is to say the slimmest of books to say volumes.

The October Gods
This prosaic autumn morning, on the street,
a robin. I mean: in the street. I mean:
two cars, their wheels within inches,

and the bird merely rocks, as though
on gentle branch in a slight breeze.

In the lull between cars I realize it rocks itself,
not the cars or any wind. Its pebble eye
looks at me.

My sleepy late-to-work eye
looks at it.

My plaid car rag. I throw it over the bird.
Which twitches and hitches under its blanket.
Turns and spurns.

—I scoop it up. Hold the bird
wings beat beating in my hands.
Afraid of the life in it, of maybe its death.

Place it in the dirt and lift the rag.
The bird waits, wings spread. I can’t turn away.

Wonder if I can text can’t come
to work: there’s a bird.

Rescue is a duty settling in my skin.

I move to gather it up again to transport
to a shelter, but it has had it with me.

Lifts off flapping like a rag across the street
To our neighbour’s cherry tree.
The heart in my hands has flown,

alive and whole, whole and alive,
it is beating, has beaten me.