Outside the Staples Center in Downtown Los Angeles
Ravens fly over the skyscrapers, cutting
the blue above S. Figueroa Street
and you want to know what they see
from that vantage point, what they eat,
whether rats are scurrying where the helicopters
land. I look around for green to touch beneath
the gleaming, beyond the people on the streets.
What reason for the inequality of days?
The ravens reel in loopy circles thirty stories
high. A monstrous crane slowly lowers
a row of men down the side of a skyscraper
to clean its eyes, the glass as bluish-green
as the sea, the air washed with the sounds
of sirens a mile away, the homeless returning.
An early hour is a good hour
In the cold dawn, the cottontails have emptied themselves
from the dense thicket of Russian olives
lining the driveway.
They race into the headlights
then freeze
like dewdrops on grass tips,
chopping the quiet up.
I stop so they can finish
what they’ve started.
An early hour is a good hour
to talk to cottontails
and ask why god has made
some perfect.
I study their grey rabbit faces,
their eyes sent to the sides
of their heads
their coats and soft napes,
their lack of pretense.
I consider the habits we each have formed
for early morning, overlapping
in our orbits
our daily rituals
pausing and repeating
in the half-light of dawn
repetition a key
that opens a door.
To All the Starlings
To all the starlings making murmurations
above us, across sky-beams, yawning blue-shafts
exchanging air for feathers as if one organism,
to all the horses and other odd-toed ungulates
corralled or caught or pushed off stamps
of land, to all the cetaceans and crustaceans
traveling the oceans, beached or taken to a lab,
to all the chickens, pigs and other domestics,
the salmon and the sturgeon and other bony fish,
to all the wildcats in the world, to all the ants
of industry, to all egg-laying queens
washing themselves clean in moth light
to the last red wolf and all the dogs—
I take note, murmuring my admiration.
If existence is the exchange is the music
is the water flowing down the light it catches
is the dripping of the sounds in evening gutters
if we are open and aware of all the others
if the exchange is the music is the stars exploding—
Header photo of downtown Los Angeles by Gabriele Maltinti, courtesy Shutterstock.