are turning into old window glass, warped,

distorted at a thousand points, watching

the moon’s fine edge start to fray.  But it’s spring,

and as if our rooms perched in its branches,

a flowering tree fills the windows.  How easy

to say as if—as if we were that couple of tiny

northern parulas, flitting from limb to limb,

as if we had flown all night, then dropped down

through power lines to feed at first light,

exhausted and starving, intent on the journey,

impelled to breed, breed, make life, always more life.

My grandmother of the coke bottle lenses,

of the enormous blue eyes flying close

to the glass like a creature about to crash,

used to recite when she stumbled, “’I see,’

said the blind man when he bumped into the light,”

which I only recalled after slamming into

the plate glass I must have thought was a door—

or didn’t think at all, lost inside my head,

as I charged full speed into spectacle-snap,

black-eye smack, at which I saw suddenly

how much I didn’t see at all, with a whole

restaurant watching.  When a bird flies into glass

does it pass from stun to sob, and have to

make up a new song, or does it shake off

the shock and go on where it was headed

all along, forget reflection?  “I once was blind,

but now I see,” John Newton wrote, and then

gave up his slave ship to grieve all the ruin

he had wrought.   But how did he come to see—

what fell from his eyes, what lens was corrected?

Until I really looked, I thought geese flew

in those perfect V’s we were taught in school,

which would mean this flock heading north aren’t geese

at all, with their constantly changing  stream

of unraveling threads, with their one straggler

wildly flapping to catch up, that outsider

squawking a different tune.   Now a small breeze

flies into the tree, so its blossoms flutter,

and a few tear loose to rise, to drift briefly

in the otherwise unseeable air,

that invisible substance we call nothing

and couldn’t live two minutes without.

gray skies, fog seeping up from the harbor

through the rougher streets of our town.

He’d scurry on icy walks,

past the saint-crammed Catholic gift shop—

a small skittish man glancing furtively.

Bored punks would turn as he passed,

then,  forget it, they’d lean back, not worth the hassle….

And so he’d escape unscathed,

our neighborhood  pilgrim, cross-wired

and benign, part of SSI’s ragged intelligentsia,

exhausted by his meds, but happy

to pin up flyers for galleries and open mikes.

And he was pleased to hover henlike

over his briefcase of smudged verses

typed off the paper’s edge, apocalypse

in cross-outs and coffee rings, where angels

fling down fire, the poor shake off coats of lead.

I thought what he wanted me to see

in the darkened church were apostles in blue

and red glass robes, their scrawny fingers stretched

toward heaven.  But, no, he loved the small

expressionless moon-white faces set in each corner

like children peering in from the cold.

Blank souls, he said, waiting for birth into

our school of sorrows, wanting our bright clothes,

no matter where those colors come from.

Just to sit with them, he’d set out in winter dusk

through a warren of streets and half-streets

as mist thickened its glaze.  Sometimes

the janitor would find him curled in a pew,

prayer book open to the place where you could

fill in the names of everything unwanted,

unfinished, given undignified ends.

And now for years to come, whoever turns

the pages of that book, searching for a sign,

will find his jittery ink, and not knowing

of the stones the kids sometimes threw,

or the bus that backed up and killed him,

they’ll just see these half-drawn waifs

staring back from the margins, as if in love

with every fumble and ache of flesh.

And over them—I dog-eared the page—

his bright scrawl, Don’t be afraid, Do not—

underscored three times—cry any more.