Sometimes Its Just a Sky

Sometimes Its Just a Sky

Looking back, the thousand-century stare fleeting through
like Horus. or more like this feathered exclamation point
fleeting through the right now; or just sometimes
fleeting through:

Because sometimes it's just a sky:
not an echoing canyon of sandstone clouds
constantly dissolving sedimentary landscape into
always the into of somewhere; sometimes isn't

a dark night cry of lovers' gone
pricked with stars like memories or needle-hopes:

isn't sometimes centuries upon millenia upon moments of
flattened, alternating black and blues like
the scrolled-out map of time written in three phoenix inks,
sun's return; departure; re-return in new-fledged form.

Sometimes it's just the sky, sometimes
a field of clear air stroked by invisible fingers,
and breezes like cats' purr – but still

there's that falcon, a solid fact, bookmark of reality
compressed from feather blood and bone, squeezed clean by distance

to a restless dot:

a single point distilled from motion and blackness
floating on the clear aguardiente, Ouzo, mezcal of a slow dawn's light; –

but also... And then again...
Then again, there's the falcon,
and then there's the falcon's shadow...

no, not the real one
telegraphing along the ground its' one-word warning
for every rabbit to read for miles that can
and for miles

         “RUN!”
                   “RUN!”
                             “RUN!”

The shadow I speak trails back through minds
of hairless apes that have no more inborn need
to fear, hate, love, covet, or even occur that there is a falcon
than a pebble does... that one, say,
the mud-colored clot of stone with one white streak
teasing through the browny-grey like my talking through this now –
that streak knows falcons
and their shadows:

knows the messenger of Zeus hanging, hovering
in slow and terrible spirals towards the doomed city below;
knows Horus post-betrayal winging his feathery cry across the desert:
“Find my body, sister, lover! Piece me back together
with the returning year.”

That streak of quartz has heard the echoes falcons give
who are no falcons of flesh and blood at all, who are
loves and myths and magics transformed to falcon-shape
fleeing the smoke and steel and dry unbelief
of a rising century …

and then sometimes, again, it's just a sky.