Some White Bird
     “They take and release sunlight
     like stained glass outside my small window.
     A light that sometines prompts me to want
     to leave the world and settle, like some white bird
     on another mountain.”
                                              from Lightfoot by Charles Wright

There are dinosaurs on my porch, weighing
down the nameless trees sprouted there, scattering
leaves, with bodies small to my hand. Winged
remnant-cousins, common as sparrows. Twig-
legged, egg-borne just the same. They fling
air aside with as much abandon as their ancient
grands, stub-winged and downy, plated tails swishing.
Aloft, their soft bodies scatter. Late going
     they take and release sunlight

in their tiny beaks, heedless of the shape
of shadows they’ve left behind like seed-husks. Shade
accumulates on the window sill, the kitchen table,
the bowl of a spoon. Maybe it will add wild tang
to the soup, shouldering its surface-scrim, elbowing
a bubble upwards. A slow potato nudges carrot discs,
rolls the barley-beads across the kettle bottom.
Steam frosts my glasses as I stir, sip, watch the light
rearrange asters and maples at the edge of my yard,
scattering bruise-purple petals, toothy leaves
sun-shot gold and patina’d
     like stained glass outside my small window.

That same high, small rectangle, boxed in beside the door,
an afterthought or concession to someone else, I suppose.
It’s a surprise package of seasons and hours I delay
opening, sometimes. A treat. A treasure. Sometimes
a startlement of pain. One winter, the moon
froze in place, weighted with glacial ice, ancient,
dripping itself away, misting up toward a star-rent sky,
finding comfort at last among the craters and cold, cold seas.
Slowly it melted into
     a light that sometimes prompts me to want

another home, another earth-world where I can breathe
and sing, push aside shadows, cup benign starlight
so very old, yet it still feels its way toward the edge
of whatever envelops, unseen. But will there be
birds to ponder, in that new place? Will there be soil.
life-sift of boulder and antelope, green leaves
to make patterns? Is it moon-madness, this pull, this lean
     to leave the world and settle, like some white bird

released from it’s brown-speckled egg, nested near raucous
waters, handled by winds and twig-toed feet, to embrace
blue air in search of whatever is beyond pervious clouds,
to eye-map unrecorded valleys, the fire-shaded scree
     on another mountain?