iThey are too large for the tangling city scene,
the dusty roar, the trash, blares, and edges
of its speeds. And yet they alight serene

on median strips and blank lawns, the richest
beast in view. Asian ballerina balanced
to strike a lizard in the reeds. Just

to feed the tight white frame and dance
in that slow motion garners praise,
but ibis also aims to startle remembrance

with simple feats. Behold the art by which they raise
their necks to pluck then loop to preen
and how, while gardeners mow and yawn, they poise

their fan wings on a hedge and weave their lean
legs and talons like tendrils on a branch.
They watch the ruckus of world with an eye as keen

as any other bird's, but when they launch
to flight it is not in fear but sadly sure
their act has not a single sigh procured.
Art's awkward duty is to ask too much.

For one mile of it or thereabouts a pelican
flew beside us, glided exactly above
the concrete wall of the bridge, barely
a feather or muscle moving, exact
as a line thrown on the page of the world
with a ruler. From a quarter mile back
I saw the bird lift syrup slow, then suddenly
aright itself and take to an invisible
track four feet or so above the barrier,
and I knew I would have to brake a bit, and more
as we got closer, to cruise along his glide
in that joy exclusive to parallels.
Never mind that we were coming home
from a honeymoon, and that any dicethrow
of weather, bloom, sand, cloud, any dicethrow
spoke utterly of harmonies. Never mind love.
We, axle-bound and land-held, got to glide
along with Icarus, red-striped chest, grey and white,
thick as purpose, as if designed for nothing
if not for this trajectory, this one flight
to escort the poetry of coincidences.

Once they were men fully because they belonged,
and everywhere they looked and chatted and sipped
a bit of coffee, whisked away a fly with a wrist
or jolted a newspaper readably straight,
or flirted, or worried about the world and where
the damn country was going as a trolley rolled
and curtains dipped and bulged breast-like
and hid again in the proper window. They were
home and citizens of it and dared and loved
and were decent and stole and killed and loved again.
They were home. How like the root in the earth,
the crease in the linen, the wind rending the cloud,
the growl in the hunger, the pavement sprayed
with waves crashing against the sea wall.
How like all right things in the mind of place,
they jostled and failed, learned and betrayed.
Like coins in pockets made for them
they cried stridently or simply tinkled in murmurs,
and it didn't matter if talk or life had substance.
Right of place was substance.

There is no enough in exile. Not enough anger,
and the blanket of safety always leaves the feet bare.
And it is here, no matter how clean and golden,
that one learns how different the wrist and the fly
and the shot of wave, how once never stops
calling although the law of distance deafens.
Memory is the heart's gravity.
The accent of their children
becomes unbearably alien, a dampness
from the sidewalk creeping past the thin sole
and into the ignored sock. Now nothing
escapes notice and the balance is always against.
And it hits them, these never again composed,
that the time to see and hear was then,
when rightness held even the stormy evils
of the quotidian in the same palm
with the trash of years of seconds
and the kissed joys.
Then, as we have come to know, was
the proper place to gaze at the dust
of butterfly panoplies, ponder
the calligraphic crud on china,
relinquish decorous ears to taught goatskins,
wash in the lace on Sunday clouds,
and otherwise pay attention
with one's whole life to shadows
knitting five centuries of incomparable capital,
field's antique jewel, and the cradling shore.
God it was who let them die
filled with late understanding,
so who dares say we the innocent lurk
unpunished in the works and days?

The yellow tread-wheeled
mythic shadow
rises from my lawn
where city workers,
halfway through new storm
drains, abandoned it
neatly curbed to night.
The mud has drabbed to sand
lace splats across golden steel,
and the piston of arm
that will soon muscle the earth
now chills beneath a veil of dew.
For hours it caught the cloudy
moon and smelled the foxes
and swayed molecular
to the heave of globe
or the crumple of healing soil.
And it foresaw a hurricane
upon a weighed kingdom.
In other words, it knew the night
as it alone can know it, mechanical
even in sleep, unbearably
strong, the great claw of man
waiting for the morning crew
to tear and feast upon
the earths lurking
emptiness.