And one bird sometimes makes another, until
the sky is shadowed in peeled off birds,
their black bodies wing-lit and foreign
in their flight past us, we who are making
other lives and filling them. Somewhere
in the neighborhood, a man's body laves
the impression of another body---that one
in the shape of one who explains to the curtains
that tomorrow, he says, tomorrow, he says
importantly, tomorrow is another day.
In the house at the mouth of the Salmon River, I wake
to a night sealed in by clouds, but brightened
by winter. The river hauls itself into the sea, as if
to fill the edge of low tide. Sticks bound
by weeds into long bodies float past the mouth
into the ocean open wide as a year. They are silent
and skim lightly, but they are never coming back.
My child cries without waking, then enters
a silence so blank, I stop breathing. The water is darkest
where the bodies pass and shadow, so many
of them that the banks should be scoured
by morning. But even then, it is that same
as with each night; the sticks, the river, the sea.
- Jennifer Boyden
