Katherine L. Holmes
Puddle
Horizon of a dream fell into a puddle.
Afraid of becoming a cat
I didn’t lap it up.
Instead I soared in the black beyond
pausing at
the dimming corona below me.
Seeds were floating
spots of light coming on
from a building I couldn’t enter.
I stabbed the brilliance
beak of an umbrella tip
wanting a sip in the cameo
of a rained-out day that I might have bathed in.
Then I saw someone shattered
near my damp shoe.
In apology
The other year
we went up to hawk's ridge
where the pacing platform
was trampled
with the running shoe tread
of spectators.
They say the falcons and hawks
are passing over again
visible from our view
at gliding altitude
the hooded houses below
and a ruffled brownish sea
under a sky that had gotten dirty.
There was a relapse
of childish chagrin,
household desolation when someone
doesn't show up
because when there were no hawks
the shorn sentinels
of too-late hover.
We looked around at
the ransacked forest
in glum late-autumn
and then at each other
our sparse sentiments
and you said, "This is where
everyone comes on the hunch..."
They say the hawks are passing over
but I didn't rush out to hawk's ridge.
Glumly I was looking
outside on an animated autumn
when my gaze
fell to the top step
above our gutter of grasses
not on the mowing map.
A soft rooster shape
brown as flapping fall leaves
sat there. I thought,
it must be a cat,
staring at the hawk sitting
so I disbelieved
its presence.
Rushed down,
hawk-like, and the fleeting
fantastically waited
until I saw the eyes
round and probing
the self-possessed beak
and an amber elbow-patch.
A marsh hawk malingering
though I'd alerted any quarry
because it careened
definitely as Venetian blinds
sifting through September trees
while I wished we didn't have to look
for our uplifts
that at a low spot they could appear
to us who spend holidays together.
