Sketches of a Dead Man Breakfasting with God -- Star Black

VIII

Panjandrums nudge me
from my soirees with dripping trees.
"We must cut trees down,"
state the authorities, who want t ocut tree:
"we must clear the air of bats,
of bat-winged vanities."
My love will start rehearsals soon.
Crowds will arrive at Hartford:
sculptors from Japan,
Thai buddhists.
It will be a grand-slam audience,
an ache for the absolute.
Palmy interludes disrupt the oncoming truth.
Crickets copulate below the orange juice.
Tiretracks survive,
amassed by tides of sunrise.
They, too, have a moment,
a paddywhack imprint.
Crows scat,
impatient with the plurals of rain.
Time sweeps, like a scarf from a neck, the water's pour.
Spiders unclasp and stretch
in the air's besotted silence
which is now laced
with the reinstated whir
of parking lots amid conifers,
their outbreeding of bloated earth, of toad's feet,
suspended above
damp expectant burrs.