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Leavening


The sun’s up somewhere east of the grove
not much above the parched hills
and the moon’s gone from the skylight over the bed.
On the orange table a green metallic fly
does a fly-walk, speeded-up, jerky.
Quail in oak leaves pick after insects,
scold phantoms.
I’m no longer silver-shoed,
descending through sleep
the endless cabin stairs.
 
Noon. A dust-colored moth quivers up a screen
above the table, confused by some imagined glow
where all heat, all light swirl in.
In t-shirt and underwear I survive,
survive rather well despite the baking.
Had I been deft at suicide I’d be eight years dead,
wouldn’t know a quail call from a finch’s
or have watched, just this morning, a rufous towhee
talking to itself – not the querulous hillside flaunt
to scare off scrubjays, but complex music saved.
 
The fly’s larger cousin arrives with evening,
multicolored and pugnacious.
His striped back and red eyes speak business.
Lasciviously he rubs forelegs, trying to choose between
red wine, waterglass and me. 
It’s almost cricket time,
time for oil lamp and praying mantis.
Time to saute fish with onion, garlic, ripe tomato.
What’s sweet grows sweeter
like the man who waits 100 miles away.
 
Five hummingbirds hover in fountain spray.
Green and purple, with lacy wingtips,
coming in for midair gulps.
They chase each other off and circle back. 
Had I better understood pills and carbon monoxide
I wouldn’t rise in these hot rooms.
Moths mob the screen.
Something transparent rasps against bamboo.
Up at the pond
frogs are calling all the water beings in.