Some Invisible
A week or so of martins splicing
horsehair, mud-loaded mouths
ground to floodlight,
until the rim bends
to last year’s parenthetical arc; then speckled eggs
the size of a man’s thumbprint.
The young, newly blued, gray
down still soft-falling from their wings,
gauge the strawed rim, take flight
like some invisible offered hand, one
then another, and another in a remnant wheel
of moons from the night we measured
the telescope’s glass eye against the summered dark,
a hill’s sky-stifled swell, the strain of sight
in its nightwork. Then the fling of lights,
the tumbled fronts of stars, Saturn’s exacting orbit,
each ring’s precise embrace as the planet balanced
on one unseen leg.
Tonight, the same starlight dies endlessly
toward us; each horsehair hangs silver-dipped,
as if in preservation.
Come morning, the birds will swerve from
their innate parabolic orbits, the controlled burn
of their nature a kind of felt knowledge,
this hand we take when offered,
this instinctive cry that says return, return.
Leslie Adams
Copyright © 2011
Leslie Adams’ poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in
Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Adirondack Review, and New South and
been anthologized in Southern Poetry Anthology Volume II: Mississippi.
She holds an MA in English from Mississippi State University and is currently an
MFA Poetry Candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
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