The Shadow of its Flight

One last poem, one thick smudge
across the page, one smeared fingerprint,
one more prisoner to be shoved
across the broken ground.

Somewhere a clear green sky rises;
somewhere the rain has stopped.
Somewhere bare feet step on naked wood.

"Tell them," said Jefferson Davis,
long after it was all over,
trying hopelessly to explain, "tell them
I only loved America."

A disillusioned follower, well aware
of the poisonings and absurdities,
the fifty-three Rolls Royces, told me too
that to be in the room with Bagwan Rajneesh
was to be in the presence of someone
greater than a human being.
"I still think that, it's still true," he said,
a mournful apostate, broken at the root.

A swift and skillful bird plays on the wind,
turns, rolls, and with a flourish, lands on the wire:
revealing, this close, the imbecile profile
and depthless eye of a pigeon.

The blue pulse at your temple
is the shadow of its flight.