Concerning Endings

                     I

Policeman-car waits in the tall grass

between directions, coils thrumming

remains of a fresh kill nearby

mangled deer and crumpled hood

yellow lights signaling distress

attract its attention; purring, it

winds its way across the highway

flashing blue ears pricked:

authorized vehicles only...

Authorized vehicles only, on the next hill

a convocation of tractors,

low and still with silent riggings,

consider what becomes a free people

under the circumstances, when in the course...

one has a copy of Robert's Rules on its dashboard.

They are still there when the policeman-car passes,

muttering deep within their grills,

but they are allowed.

                    II

Ducks – no, sparrows – no, ravens circle

no; vultures over the desert

(a scene like a kite-field on a good windy afternoon)

call to one another above the wreck

of a ship run aground, from which

survivor sailors stagger and stumble.

From the mast swings the captain,

hanged in the mutiny, drowned in effigy

he danced beneath the crow's nest

(soon no more a figure of speech – he'll feed the chicks)

but he laughed last:

before the mutineers got him he fixed the rudder,

spun the globe beneath his finger and sent them where it stopped,

loyal with disloyal.

Those now alive wade among the shimmering waves of silver heat,

each dragging a sea-chest manacled to his ankle,

a line for every point of the compass,

four wakes in the sand.

One dreams of strawberries,

another of rosewater beside a gilded mirror,

the third shades his brow from the sunset,

and sees its ruddy light stain his hands the color of raw flesh.

The fourth has already collapsed.

Birds, swooping down, do not care how the ship arrived.

                    III

Green hills, ruffled by the fingertips of a passing wind,

soon resume subsuming all the footfalls

that rhythm atop them into underground libraries,

cadence upon cadence, slow writers.

They will read to one another all that was,

when the long dark has come,

in exquisite polysyllabic undulations.

Perhaps some one of them will say, with satisfaction,

that such midwinter rituals had been their idea 

from the start.