Morgan's Variety Store
began
with a mail-order business in glare
refined from the oily tears
mother
whales cried
when their calves were taken away
by the spastic engineers. Now we sell
the whiskers of walruses, the breath
of worms,
our windows display
set in gold
the snowflakes that have fallen
each summer since grandfather died
who sold
his estate in the east
to start a cigar factory
(now there
was a man who took risks).
 
In these green bottles you'll find
a medicinal essence
derived
from the fossilized ova
of bees, and this                         
locked case
to which there is only one key
which I wear beneath my shirt
holds a sphere that no one
can see
except under polarized light
on the median days of the year:
the crystalline liquid
inside
can influence your genes.
It must be used with dread.
 
Or never used at all
but only contemplated
like
all things
in this store
which grandfather founded on smoke
from cigars
which he packaged and sold—the store
he left to me
to dream as I fall toward the stars.
                        

The dead have no location, no language.
They do not gossip.
 
When you join the dead they will not
welcome you into their club.
 
The dead ear does not hear the dirge.
It is not deaf.
 
The population of the dead is zero.
A massacre in Corsica will not add to their numbers.
 
A dead babe does not age in the grave.
It does not stay young either.
 
If you are feeling sorry for yourself,
you are still alive.
 
The pictures we have of the dead are not accurate.
The flowers are appreciated.
 

ARCHIVES OF THE AIR
 
This guy who knows more about cranes 
than they know about themselves 
(because their brains 
are thumbnail small) explains that the sandhill’s
 
call—a loud rattle and a squeak—comes not from 
one crane’s beak but two, the male’s note answered 
by his mate’s. 
Also, he states, when one of them croaks,       
 
the survivor often hangs around for months 
and mopes, and here he relates the story of
a grieving 
female in the DMZ between the 
 
two Koreas, rescued at great risk 
by South Korean troops and shipped to him in
Maryland, though                               
the law forbids it, yet she arrived 
 
safely and briefly joined his local set. 
He’s the one who, using ultra-lightweight 
planes with crane 
insignias, teaches home-bred whooping 
 
cranes to migrate. Whoopers are less endangered 
thanks to him. He raised one female from 
the egg and, 
wearing a crane costume and pointing his beak 
 
to the sky while flapping his fake crane wings 
and jumping up and down, coached her in 
the mating dance, 
but when someone jokes, “Sounds like a fine 
 
romance,” our self-styled crane-iac shakes his head. 
“Totally boring,” since he had to be 
outfitted and at                                    
her beck and call whenever she wanted to ball.                     
 
Nestlings keep their distinctive peep for 
a year, though fully grown by then, 
so the family unit                                                      
holds through one full cycle of migration. 
 
They ride the mile-high winds with a sixth
magnetic sense that returns them to the acre
            where they began,
a skill that puzzles even our crane man. 
 
As we circle the field, watching through our scopes 
the long-legged, red-capped semi-prehistoric crew, 
scuffles and 
skirmishes erupt and feathers ruffle,              
 
some lower their shoulders and crane their necks 
suggesting flight. Some glide in low and land
while others take off.  
“If the chill is strong,” he says, “perhaps tonight.”